


Lovetown

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, First Time, M/M, Pining, Season 2, Shifters, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 01:08:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13376901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: Spill your guts.





	1. Spill your guts.

**Author's Note:**

> Set between Crossroad Blues and Croatoan, so Dean has not yet told Sam about John's last words. Beta'd by the eternally kind and generous [WetSammyWinchester](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WetSammyWinchester/pseuds/WetSammyWinchester). Remaining errors mine.
> 
> Title from the Peter Gabriel song.  
> Second chapter title from Michel Foucault's _History of Sexuality Vol 1_.  
>  Third chapter title from Mclusky's That Man Will Not Hang.  
> 

When Sam finally finds him—thirty endless gasping minutes clearing the engine room, the shop floor, the dock, the offices, everywhere the same goddamn shade of decrepit—pressing a rag to his belly, held upright only by the sheer flogging need to find his brother—when he flings open the stairwell door Dean is just standing there, a flight below, jacket yanked over the vulnerable curve of his shoulder and the shifter leaned in real close, whispering something in his ear.

Dean's eyes are closed. His hips canted in.

His hand is pressed to the shifter's chest. Clutching or pushing, Sam can't tell. 

The shifter looks real goddamn familiar. When Dean shoves the knife between its ribs and jerks it out, serrated and brutal, its blood looks real familiar too. It gets a surprised look under its bangs like Dean betrayed it somehow.

Its legs collapse. It hits the ground at the same time as Sam.

::

It ruins them. It happens quick.

::

Shifters have access to memories, thoughts. Just from a touch. A conversion. That's a fucked-up thing that has plagued Sam for a long time. Is that all he is? His meat? Xerox him and there's no functional difference besides a tendency towards murder?

Does nothing about him supervene?

Does nothing about him escape the rule of his cells?

So the shifter knew. 

So. Dean knows.

::

They're beat-up. They're covered in blood.

They lurch down another flight to discover that the exit is blocked, glued shut by time and disuse. Lurch back up and Sam gets tetanus seventeen times off the rusted banisters, drags his feet once more through the pool of his own facsimilied blood, Dean fixed straight ahead, hauling him through to the offices. Dean nearly breaks a toe trying to kick aside haphazard de-furnitured planks of MDF with staples and nails sticking out.

He keeps saying _come on, Sam, come on, hold on, motherfucker._ At one point he slaps Sam, hard. Sam tastes iron.

Everything inside the offices is woozy, hazy, grime-filtered. The windows are frozen. The wallpaper is peeling. The indoor plants are uncontained. They've burst their bounds. There's mould on the mould.

It's a place for degenerates. Plenty of holes for Sam to hide.

“Check out on me and I'll kill you myself,” Dean says, and drags him up so his knees aren't on the ground anymore. Sam's arm is wrenched across his shoulder and the socket feels like it might pop.

“Again?" Sam says. Maybe out loud. He's not sure how much of him is working. The stairs down to the shop floor are vertiginous, open steel and they frighten him deeply. He loses himself, flails for the doorhandle and bangs his cast and an ache springs up deep in his wrist, makes him gasp, blink back tears. 

Everything inside him is fucked.

The shifter put holes in Sam. Stole his silver knife and drew clean teasing lines across his chest, his belly. Got its hands all through him.

Copied him right up. 

Started whispering.

::

“Look,” Sam grates out the next afternoon, on the downswing of a mistimed Ibuprofen/T-3 wave. Dean is drinking rotgut coffee and flicking through muted channels. There's an open beer on the table. His cuticles look rusted. “I don't know what it told you--”

“You know,” Dean says, bitter, unwilling to support any falsehoods. Now that Sam is guaranteed to make it through the next twelve hours suddenly Dean's not his friend anymore.

Sam stares down at his own fingers, the cracks in his callouses. They hold stains like his body's trying to suck the blood back in. It reminds him of his dad's hands. The hands of men who work.

The curtains are thrown wide open. The day is deeply present, hallowed white winterlight, enough to make his eyes ache but his reach isn't long enough to save himself from the glare. 

His stitches pull in fishbone rows as he breathes. The bandages are stained. He probably should have gone to a hospital. 

He can't handle this.

“Gimme one of those,” he says, and Dean looks down at the sixpack by his feet and back up at Sam. Cold as the world outside, withdrawn, sucked back behind his eyes.

It's a nightmare. He looks like their dad just died all over again. He might not have slept, while Sam was down. Over twenty-four hours. He might be tripping the rage fantastic.

“You can have water,” he grunts. 

“Fine,” Sam snaps. “Water then.” He shuffles another few inches upright to catch the bottle Dean tosses at him. Swallows and wipes his mouth. Digs at the label with his thumbnail, under the spike of Dean's gaze. 

“It's not a big deal,” he says, and Dean mocks agreement, lips pursed as he nods along. “Forget about it.” 

Dean snaps his fingers in the air. “Yeah, just like that.”

He can't meet Dean's eyes but he keeps his voice hard. He won't beg. It wasn't his fault. It's not something he ever wanted, and it's not something he should have to answer for. “It's nothing to do with you.”

“That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say, _little brother_ ,” Dean says, draining his lunch. Sam holds his flinch down deep inside. “Can you stand?”

Sam tenses. Probably not, if he's being honest.

“Yeah,” he says, guarded. Maybe a punch coming his way and welcoming it if that's the case, if that'll get them past it.

“You see the pills on the counter?” Dean's only showing him his profile. Sam's mood swings right around into fear and his voice loses its fight.

“Yeah.”

Dean's on his feet, patting his pockets down. Shrugging into his jacket. Has his hand on the door before Sam can think what to say.

“There's food in the fridge,” Dean says. “Don't touch my beer.”

“Dean.”

“Check the edge on those knives. And find the silver bullets, they'll be, I don't know, they'll be somewhere. You packed them.”

“Wait.”

“The room's paid up,” Dean says, knocking Sam about twenty feet out of his mind.

“What a fucking pussy you are,” Sam says, vicious and low. 

“Worse things to be,” Dean mutters, and the door shuts tight behind him.

::

Wherever Dean finds to drink, whoever he finds to fuck: it takes Sam about six hours to let his anger bleed out, to come around to hoping it helps him.

He lays on the bed and shivers through a _Judge Judy_ marathon, shirt unbuttoned and a blanket pulled up over his chest. Tries to stay hydrated. Stares at Dean's duffel, sagging open on the luggage bench like it's been gutted. 

His phone rings through twice, Ellen's name on the display. Ten minutes later he watches Dean's backup phone buzz its way off the top of the TV. It hits the ground with a satisfying thud, and quiets. Sam hopes it's broken.

He eats the ham sandwich in the fridge. It tastes like chemicals and has the consistency of glue. He orders pizza and leaves the boxes to grease up Dean's bed. He stares at the lumpy wallpaper until his eyes cross and potatoes dance into focus, pitted and dirty.

He takes his antibiotics and fails to not scratch his stitches and listens to the trucks grumble past on the highway, purposeful, on their way to somewhere better.

He taps, bored, unseeing, through _Idaho State Journal_ and _Trent Valley Tribune_ obituaries and funeral notices. No mention of a body at the factory. Their cover doesn't seem to be blown. 

No threats knock on his door to kindly break the tedium.

“Ellen,” he says, the third time, and she cuts him off right away.

“You two are the living end,” she says, icy, which is how he knows what kind of call this is. “If your brother wants to speak to my daughter again--”

Sam hangs up. Easy and weightless. He lets go the phone and thinks it might float right up into the air.

Another bridge burned. 

He likes the Harvelles. When he's back in his right mind this is gonna be one that hurts.

She doesn't call again.

::

There's a lot about Sam that's no good. That went wrong.

Demons have a plan for him; told him that to his face, using his dad's mouth. There are kids out there just like him. If they're not dead there's a high chance they're killing. 

People around him drop like flies. Sometimes the future comes for him such indifferent violence it puts him on his knees.

He's got a list as long as his arm of the ways he'll never be normal.

Dean's name is at the top.

Back when Sam was seventeen and it had been going on long enough that he knew it was part of him for real, he'd had his fears. The worst: his father looking at him and knowing. Seeing right through to his core, and _knowing_ how far off the reservation Sam had run. Almost as bad: Dean staring at him, a stranger, disgusted, disappointed.

There were brighter days when his certainties shifted track and he entertained the idea that maybe one day Dean would find out, figure him out like he figured most things out about Sam and he'd be mad and confused and give Sam holy hell for whatever stretch of time would make it okay for him; but that afterwards he'd look at Sam with that same old bemused face and be thinking, there's my kid brother, the freak, who I forgive everything. And Sam would get to feel his love again.

Or he'd thought—maybe—he'd dreamed, sometimes, shivering—on a wild sick sliver of tamped-down hope that Dean would lean forward and grab him, blistering. Awe in his eyes and he'd be saying yes, yes, me too. Me too, Sam. 

I'm the same.

::

Anyway, that was a kid's dream.

::

It's two days before Dean returns; not even that long. Late Tuesday morning. It feels like it's been a year. The boredom and loss eats his drugs and steals his sleep and there are hours that are hard and cold and moments that stretch and spin him until he's reeling, and he rubs his own flaking blood from his cast and catches himself thinking with a stupid orphan's hope that if Dean comes back maybe everything will be okay.

When the door swings open all his heat flees and his chest collapses, leaves him small and panicked. He scrambles for his gun.

Dad.

The light clicks and the silhouette resolves into Dean.

The adrenaline leaves him fizzy, mad. His muscles tremble as he hitches up against the headboard. There's copper on his tongue.

Dean, wordless, dumps his keys on the table and looms above, unshaven, eyes red-rimmed, bruised-looking. Brushes Sam's shirt aside; checking the cuts on Sam's belly his eyes narrow and he lays the back of his fingers across. Sam curdles inside, staring up at him.

“Did you even move?” Dean says, gruff, disdainful. “You reek.”

“You told Jo,” Sam says, waspish. “I can't believe--”

Dean snatches his hand back, stumbles. “Are you—are you out of your goddamn mind?”

“Ellen--”

“Why the _fuck_ would I tell _Jo_?”

“You talked to her.”

“Yeah I talked to her, I didn't _tell_ her.” Dean blanches. “Jesus, Sam. That's sick.”

“Okay, whatever, okay,” Sam says, and rolls away from him, stretches to get his feet on the floor and holds his stomach, bent over, waiting for the pain to hit.

Sick. It's sick.

He can feel his brother fuming at his back.

“Who,” Dean says, knife edge on his voice. “Who is there. That I could say _anything_ to.”

“Shut up.”

“You want me to call up Bobby and tell him?” he says, and Sam's guts lurch. “Maybe I'll get that ouija board back out and give Dad a ring.”

This is the end, the end, this is so far beyond Sam's capacity to bear he's not sure how his heart is pumping at all. His fingers are cold when he presses them to his forehead. His mouth is dry, his tongue thick and stupid. 

“Leave it alone. It's none--”

“Of my business? It doesn't have to change anything?”

_Yeah_. What a joke. He wipes his face. He's gross with sweat, dried and returned. His hair is stiff. He stinks. He's dizzy.

“What's next, Sam? Anything else you got hiding in there? You like to torture puppies? You secretly a Nazi or something?”

Sam levers himself to his feet. His joints aren't working right. He stares at the carpet between his toes, grimy and beige, patchy. 

“Stop.”

“Or what?”

“I'll make you stop.”

Dean laughs. “You gonna take me down?”

“I'll leave.”

“Good luck with that,” Dean says, and then, slow, cold, on a dawning realisation: “That was why you left.” 

“What?” Sam turns to face him, surprised at his surprise. He's pale under the ugly fluorescents, his leather collar high, weak armour, and he's looking at Sam like Sam just kicked him in the balls, big eyes wide and rejected.

“This was why you _left_ us.”

He thinks he's cracked it, he thinks he knows everything that's bad about Sam now but it's not even true; not the whole truth at least, but they're past the point where Sam could say anything that would be believed. 

“Pretty slow on the uptake aren't you?” he says, and Dean nods and looks away, pinches his bitter mouth with his thumb and a knuckle. He hates Sam for that one; takes himself away like Sam doesn't deserve any of him at all, tracing his steps right back out of the room. 

Sam eases himself back down to the mattress before his knees fail on him.

There was a time he could stand tall on his own two feet. Was it so long ago? Where is he supposed to go from here?

Who would take him in?

And. 

He still. After all this. He still has a job to do.

::

Ten miles west and two off the exit, under the loom of rust-streaked silos, the road stitches out sideways into a decimated valley town: Trent, once pop. 826, current unknown and minus more every day, fleeing through the long grass, dying and not being replaced. By humans, at least.

It's shifters. Seeing his own lips pressed to Dean's ear had confirmed that finally, after three days of squat and firmly closed doors. Forum posts had brought them here, a couple of thin leads sent through from Bobby. They haven't gotten much further than that, but Sam suspects something darker than the usual grabs at belonging that shifters make. It doesn't feel personal. It feels more like...organisation. Colonisation, right out of the changeling playbook. Sam's working theory is that there's maybe eight or ten in town, going about their replicator business. 

Only one man has disappeared for good. Mostly, it's a vanished night or two—not long enough every time for warning signals to go out, not around here, and then things start turning around for someone: they go back to school, they go back to church, they quit drinking. And then that same house starts logging time on uncannyevents.net and _husband acting weird_ searches. _My sister looks at me different._

Everyone knows everyone, of course: they all buy from the same grocery store and car dealership; half were laid off when the plastics factory closed, and the other half when the hospital shifted services to Malad City; they go to the same churches, the same school, but beyond that Sam's at a loss to draw direct connections. 

One missing, and delinquents and fuckups, redeemed. That's all they have. Turning leads into something concrete, trying to talk to them, their families, is a wash. Sam and his brother are here as PIs chasing down the missing man: Sam's idea, and a bad one, earning them gracious refusals, quiet dismissals. Closed ranks, standard for a place this size. 

They'd tried divide and conquer. They'd tried scorched earth; they'd tried dropped silver dollars and palmed silver rings, for naught. The Sheriff came down specifically to warn them. Once it started looking like an endurance affair they had to back off in case they grew a reputation, got blackballed entirely. Dean, coming off their run-in with the crossroads demon, has been less than helpful, dragging his feet like he knew all along how dense and ruinous this job would be.

Shifters are solitary creatures on the whole. There's one, Sam senses: one with ambition, trying to crawl in here cell by cell. Block by block. House by house. Someone wants to turn this town's first go-round into a dream. Someone wants a place where they and theirs will be safe. Finding them is gonna be key.

The problem with shifters, of course, is that it could be anyone.

::

More than the wounds themselves it was blood loss that kept him confined to the room for so long. Limbs too heavy to lift and a weight on his chest like a hag sitting pretty, and the knowledge that if something went wrong he'd be on his own.

His first excursion is a minor one, down for ice in reception. 

It takes him half an hour to shower, emptying the little shampoo bottle onto his head, working up a lather as best he can one-handed, drying himself feebly. His cuts sear, bright and alive, hatched across his torso. He buttons his shirt for the first time in two days. Opening the door onto a slate-grey twilight, tucking his good hand under his armpit and hunching his shoulders, he feels marginally more human.

The car is there, out front and the only one in the whole joint. Sam leans on her a moment and looks in vain for his brother. The wind whips across the lot and freezes his damp hair, says hi to his bones. It's got a lot of room to work up speed: they're at the far end of the long arm of an L, a row of single-story rooms, peaked roof with a low porch, brown eaves peeling.

A shadow, familiar, bow-legged, stalks around the corner of the reception building; flicks a cigarette, ember tracing a spark through the air, and shoves the door. Sam sighs and pushes himself upright.

The motel sign stalks him across the lot, rusted and spindly and boasting sadly about a conference room, a pool. Sam hasn't seen them; it's a fair guess they're closed. The neon in EZY has busted, leaving REST to strain alone and faint in the dusk. 

Inside, the murk of the foyer harbours the stale smell of body odour, a framed puzzle of the Sawtooth Range, and his brother.

Dean is leaning on the counter, dinging the counter bell in rapid pointed taps, obnoxious. He casts a bland look at Sam and turns pointedly away. 

_My brother doesn't even look at me anymore._

He hasn't smoked since Sam came back. If he's on them again he's either drunk or so pissed off that drink's not helping, and he doesn't look drunk. Bad idea to push it.

Sam sticks the bucket under the ice machine nozzle and thumps its side with his cast until it clangs into life, a vile death-row noise. Two chunks of ice tumble out already wet, losing shape. 

The clerk stomps in from the back room and ignores Sam too, reserving his beady little rat gaze for Dean. Dean forks over another fistful of twenties and Ratface takes the wad delicately, with a curl to his lips.

“Working hard or hardly working?”

Dean stills. Hair rises on the back of Sam's neck. 

“Excuse me?”

“I got no problem with it,” Ratface says, “but you keep it on the highway. This is a family establishment.”

Dean tilts his chin up. Glances at the nametag. “You come by the room, Francis, any time,” he says, tight. “I'll show you how I work.”

Ratface sneers. He's got stringy hair that he flicks over his shoulder. “Watch your mouth.”

“Doing a bang-up job of that yourself.” Dean rings the bell again, swaggers out on an angry blast of air, shoulders set and low. 

Sam stands there, staring. The ice rattles wetly in his bucket.

“Gettin that fixed tomorrow,” Ratface says, shooting a dirty look Sam's way. He's old enough to be Sam's grandfather. Sam wants to bury him. “Hit it again you're paying for it.”

“There aren't any families here,” Sam says, inane. Ratface frowns. “And he's not--”

“Kid,” he says, like Sam's not mostly dead, like Sam's a sweet virgin here in the middle of nowhere, ten feet from a half-acre of frigid grey parking lot and a million miles from civilisation. He nods towards Dean and waves the notes in his hand. “You _seen_ that?”

Sam's seen that. He watches Ratface instead. Watches his eyes dip down and up as he follows Dean across the asphalt.

He's not the first. He won't be the last. There are men who hate Dean for how much they want him. They're dangerous. The day Sam learned to pick them might have been the day he turned his own adult eyes on Dean and saw him with a new gaze.

Everyone wants under Dean's skin. It's not a club Sam is proud to be a part of.

::

It was the disappearance of Jeremiah Chase, owner-proprietor Flight of Angels Funeral Home And Crematorium, that turned Bobby's initial suspicions into a real case, that sung Sam and his brother in and grounded them in the ass end of eastern Idaho. This is where he was last seen, apparently: room twelve, still fluttering with tape, a sheet of plywood nailed across, interrupting the long flat line of flaking grey doors. The cops had bust the door down, looking for him on tip that seems to have been baseless.

Sam suspects Ratface called it in just for the dubious publicity. The REST EZY doesn't even rate as a place to die.

So they've got shifters, they've got the redeemed, and they've got, or rather don't have, Chase, who vanished two weeks ago. Fairly ordinary guy from what they can tell, lived a quiet lonely life. Single, but respected in town. Every Tuesday night he had a standing drinks date with Eugene Greer, who managed a stockyard out beyond the state highway. That's the last sighting of Chase that Sam trusts, confirmed by the bartender. 

Greer's on their list, but unwilling to talk. Greer's wife, trembling with distress, had all but slammed the door in Sam's face when they'd gone knocking their first day in town.

Chase is clue number one, as far as Sam is concerned. Patient zero. Sam has several hopes pinned on him that Bobby doesn't care to honour in the slightest.

“Fort Lauderdale,” Bobby says. “His grandma's about ready to give the bucket a boot.”

“ _Florida_? How long? He was last seen here on the seventh.” The wind whistles between his mouth and the microphone. It's started to drizzle. He hunches into his jacket and wonders how much Bobby can hear. Behind him, amongst the nicotine stains, he can feel Ratface staring, repulsed. Maybe clicked in to which room is Sam's, which truckstop hooker is Sam's brother. Maybe just with his rat's sixth sense.

“A hair over three weeks,” Bobby says, which makes it the end of October, which means that the Chase who went drinking with Greer that last time was no Chase at all. “You said you killed one already? You think they'll come after you again?”

“Haven't so far. Maybe they're hoping we'll go away.”

“Who was it?”

A pick-up truck pulls down off the highway, bumps too fast over the cracked and rippled asphalt and creaks to a hasty halt next to the Impala. Someone short and dark gets out and lopes up to Sam's door. Knocks, is admitted.

“Sam? Who was it?” Bobby repeats, testy.

“Me,” Sam says, and starts forward, too fast, wincing, burning in a dislocated web cross his chest and stomach and the ground slick underfoot. “I gotta go.”

“Starting to think I oughta come down there myself.” Bobby's voice is rusted with concern. He doesn't think Sam is strong enough. “You don't sound too good.”

“I'm fine,” Sam says, about the only thing he is capable of saying, and shuts his phone.

::

“I'm fine,” he snaps, again, sweating, again, knees weak, sitting on the end of the bed, small and hunched under Dean's critical gaze. He can stand, walk. Throw a couple of Excedrin down his throat and he can probably approximate a run.

It doesn't matter. Dean's not interested in bringing him out in the field. He's in a poisonous mood, smile lacquered over the top that turns genuine when he's looking at the newcomer.

Dean, it seems, found himself a new friend while he was out on the town. A woman, solid, masculine. Tatts peeking from the neck of her muscle tee and a belt buckle like a dinner plate. Her head is buzzed to a tight cap, grey threaded through the black. 

Her name is Joy. It's been no time at all, but she and Dean have a shortlist of suspects, and some kind of understanding. She laughs with Sam's brother and sits at Sam's table and sticks her gum to the side of Sam's PBR while she sucks it down. 

It's the last one. Sam is drinking whiskey out of a glass that tastes like toothpaste.

“Don't see why we can't just flush 'em as we find 'em,” Dean says, like he did the first day they rolled in, about a century ago, and Sam sighs and answers him just the same.

“If we make a mistake they'll run. Not to mention, we go around killing them one by one, you don't think the cops are gonna come start asking questions about a couple of drifters? Where they were breaking down doors last week?”

“You all know there's a better place out by the hot springs, right?” she drawls, looking around the room. “They got housekeepers and everything.”

The springs are another twenty miles out of town, for Christ's sake. He glares at his brother.

“Gives me the creeps,” Dean says, takes a drink. Checks through the curtains. “People out there not knowing who's in their house.”

Sam stands, and then doesn't know where he's going. Stares uselessly at the counter, all the way on the other side of the room. He thinks he might be shaking, a core-deep throughline shudder, but when he raises the glass in his hand it's steady. He sucks a burning minted mouthful down and walks over to grab the bottle.

“Look, you took one out on Saturday, right?” Joy says. “I just got done with the Sheriff, and he says some guy has been calling around looking for his wife.”

“She on the list?” Sam says, and she shakes her head.

“Just some wife. Stay-at-home. Five kids. Came back this morning. I figure we grab her, ask a couple of questions.”

“You're just gonna kidnap and torture someone?”

Joy raises her eyebrow at him. Dean does the same. “Jesus, Sam,” he says, disturbed, like Sam is the messed up one here, “we'll check her first.”

“Or, we could look for the bodies. If they're replacing people there'll be bodies.”

Joy taps dismissively at Sam's printouts, the funeral home, Jeremiah Chase's solitary life laid out across the table. “We went through there already. Ain't nothing but a bunch of stiffs. No doubles, no shifter remains, no weird stuff.”

“Are you serious?” Sam grinds his teeth. He's been trying to get Dean there since they arrived. They must have gone together while he was wallowing in his own filth. This is bullshit. “You saw the crematorium?”

“Like I said.”

“You went in?”

“Like,” she says, giving him the hard eye. “I said.”

“Course there was nothing there,” Dean says. “I told you there was no point. What's left? Even if this Chase dude is our head shifter, he'd be burning them up.”

I've got a _feeling_ , is all Sam can say to that, so he bites his cheek and stews and says nothing. Joy shrugs, and looks at Dean.

“Find me at Jacko's,” she says, standing, and that's the plan, apparently. That's how it's going to go down, without him, and Sam, who is the one who took the actual hit in the first place, gets no say at all. 

He pivots on his heel and heads for the bathroom. 

His tumbler fits neatly into a circle of residue on the shelf above the basin. The hot tap turns gaily under his hand and he holds his fingers under, lets the water turn them red. Lets steam creep and cloud. In the mirror he looks like a day-old car crash. Bruised eyes, unkempt, lank and slack. Stained. The silver behind his glass is tarnished. He's glad when he disappears.

In the other room, they murmur. What the hell is Jacko's anyway? A diner? A bar? Some other hunter's house? Another new friend? What did Dean tell her about him that she hates him so much?

The door shuts. A bottle clinks. 

Sam sighs, grabs his razor and the can. Swipes at the glass and Dean is there, filling the doorway. Watching him.

He's standing hip-hitched, elbow propped above his shoulder and bare skin above his belt, and that tug low in Sam's belly, that tripped beat in his chest and the way his tongue moves in his mouth, like it can almost taste: that's just something Sam's used to, when Dean puts his body out like a welcome mat.

He rinses cream off his hand. Glob and swirl down the drain and his skin crawls under Dean's gaze, insufferable.

Sam curls his fingers around the edge of the basin and leans his weight.

“What the hell,” he says, eventually. 

“Out of everyone,” Dean says, taut. Sam meets his eyes and flinches away from the chill in them. “I never thought you'd bring that shit to my door.”

A fine little knife under the ribs. It's not the same, he wants to say. I'm not like him. I'm not like them. They don't want _you_. They don't even _know_ you.

“Can we just,” he says, and swallows. “Finish this job.”

“Nothing I'd like more,” Dean says, careful, and Sam closes his eyes a moment and still can't lose the sight of him. They're both in their undershirts, heat ramped up inside and Dean's is thin and dark, stretching across his chest, the bump of the amulet tucked underneath, the swell of his biceps and it's not like he doesn't know, now. It's not like he doesn't know what he does to Sam. 

Christ, the things that shifter could have told him—the shit that went on in Sam's head--

He opens his eyes and starts with his cheek, careful as he can, still clumsy with his cast even after all these weeks. The blade isn't blunt but it's getting there and four days of stubble isn't gonna make it any better.

The rasp is very loud. Dean won't stop staring at him.

“How long?” It's bitten out. Cold. 

“Fuck off,” Sam says, through a clenched jaw. Dean shifts in his periphery, tilts his head. Shoves his hand in his pocket so his jeans pull further down. If Sam looked--

“Since when?”

Sam doesn't deserve this. He wants the old punishment back; the silent treatment at least. It's crueller than he ever thought Dean could be, even this Dean, his new brother, pared down in the wake of their father. Whatever happened to Dean in that hospital shifted something in him that Sam can't reach and now this on top; it isn't fair.

“I'm not talking about it,” he says. 

Colour rises high in Dean's cheeks and he taps at his temple. “I don't even wanna _know_ about it Sam, but those cats don't exactly go back in the fucking bag, do they?”

Sam swipes his top lip clear; his chin. Rinses and taps.

“We need new razors,” he says. A drop of blood hits the sink and he looks up and in the mirror there's a thin red trail slipping its way down his neck.

Sam watches it a while, considering.

“Why do you always gotta break everything,” Dean says, hoarse, folded down off the door now and a step closer and his fingers twitching and Sam's trapped himself in here, the one door and Dean blocking it, foolish and barefoot and a terror in Dean's eyes like he doesn't know what his hand might do once it's in reach, once it's around Sam's neck.

“Why'd you call Jo?” he blurts, and that halts Dean dead. On the uncertain side of shame, lips parted, unsure.

“To—apologise.”

“To—what?”

“I dunno. Say sorry about—Dad, or whatever.”

That makes no sense, so far as Sam can tell. What was he looking for? Absolution? Her father's dead. They're _both_ dead. How do you absolve that, over the phone? “How drunk _were_ you?” 

“Enough,” Dean says. Curls the corner of his mouth, ironic, doesn't shift his eyes from Sam. He's waiting. 

Sam stares into the mirror. “Who knows,” he says, dull, and lifts his chin, swipes up his neck. “Fourteen. Fifteen.”

Dean sways, takes it like he takes most blows. Solid, expected. Half a second before the return.

“You and him, man,” he says, strained. “Peas in a fuckin pod.”

“Him, Dad?” Sam's hand drops to the sink, a chill washing over him. “What's Dad got to do--”

“Nothing.”

“Did he—what—did he say something?”

“For Christ's sake, no.”

“Then why--”

“'Cause you're both a pain in my ass, Sam,” Dean barks, over his shoulder; he's turning and leaving, aiming for his jacket.

“Have fun striking out with a lesbian,” Sam snaps, and Dean throws him a casual middle-finger salute over his shoulder.

“Don't wait up, lover.”

“Hey!” Sam scrubs a towel over his face, dumps it on the floor and follows him through, grabs his elbow. Dean shakes him off with a scowl. Snatches his keys and his gun and stows them, sharp movements familiar in their anger and Sam reaches again to wrench him around and misses as Dean slides from under. “ _Hey_! You lay that crap on me again I _will_ take you down. You've got no right and it's just, it's just fucking mean, man, and that's not you.”

“Guess we're all trying on some new suits,” Dean says, but he's not even looking, all Sam has of him as he fades into the night is the hard carved line of his cheek, the stone wall of his shoulder, and it's not enough, it's not _enough_ , leaving Sam alone and riled and needing, hands curled into fists in the empty air, beating with fury and nowhere to aim it.

All the bullshit he gives Sam about leaving, and here Sam is trying to be rational, trying to work this job like they're supposed to, like they've been taught, like maybe they were still some kind of team, and he _ran_ , for the third time in three days he just _ran_. It's typical. It's so _typical_. Dean is always either a flood or a famine. 

It's a killing case either way, because he's all Sam's got left.

::

He was Sam's dad too, and it seems like Dean forgets that sometimes. So Sam couldn't love him as much as Dean did; or whatever passes the test for love, in this family. And maybe Sam came runner-up in their dad's esteem. But did Dean ever sit overnight by his elbow, dusk through to hazy morning hours of coffee and Latin? Did Dean ever learn how to make him laugh while refusing him to his face? Did they ever stop an extra month in town just so _Dean_ could go to soccer carnival?

Sam's dad died too, and he's been fucked up a while now, and he keeps moving forward but it's never been as tough as this. They've never driven so long on the verge, and on the short list of things Sam wants to do to his brother, beat him and touch him and hold him and fly in laughter with him down the highway, free, just them alone in the world—alongside all that is a pathetic childish need he could never shake: things kinda _suck_ , and he needs Dean to sit him down and tell him it's gonna be okay.

He's useless on his feet and in his heart, and he needs Dean to take care of him.

::

A funeral home is a fun place to go if you're alone, and you have illicit access to a shit-brown eighties Corolla that smells like Cheeto dust and old beer. He parks around the back and breaks in through the big window in the viewing room, grateful that Chase had opted for a scenic location on the edge of town instead of a residential street.

Three dead bodies on ice in the attached crematorium. Someone's been keeping business humming, with the real Chase out of state. An old woman, two middle-aged dudes. The white one looks familiar; maybe one of the people they interviewed last week, before the factory visit. The date on his toe puts him dead the morning of. Sam takes a photo of his name.

Suicide via anything pill-shaped, the sheet says. On his chest is the usual reconstructed Y, edges of the incision pinched together, bloodless, puckered and hastily done. Gaps and waves and the clean edge of skin where it's cut, like uncooked crackling.

Inside would be the organs scraped and weighed and sample-pocked, bundled back in like that remakes a person and if there had been anything different about him the examiner would have noticed, surely. These monsters that hide behind a human face. Surely, there has to be a way to tell.

His phone buzzes. A text from Dean.

_just some miserable wife. went to her sisters_

“Good work scaring the shit out of her then,” he mutters, down at the screen. Folds it shut and puts it back in his pocket, and tapping footsteps on the tile outside the door and it opens and there's a yelp of fright and Debbie Greer is standing there, her mouth open in shock, clutching her handbag to her chest.

“You, I know you,” she stammers. “Mr—Howard? What are you doing here?”

“What are _you_?”

“Um.” She backs up a step. “Jerry asked me to check on things.”

“I'm sure he did.” Sam raises his gun. “Where is he again?”

She freezes. Eyes on the barrel, fear draining into something more serious. “I don't know what you think you know--”

“Silver,” Sam says, waving the gun, and she pales and her fingers clench around her bag handles, leather creaking. “Yeah.” He gestures towards the little desk in the corner. “Sit.”

He pivots to follow her, swipes his hair out of his face as she sets her bag on the desk and stands by it. She'd been so upset, when they went out to her home. Was it all an act? She's calmer now, one of those capable old farmwives, anywhere between forty and seventy, big quilted jacket, hair tied back and a firm kind face.

It's not her face, he reminds himself.

“You're hurt,” she says.

“Finger's fine.” Sam taps it against the trigger guard. “I said sit.”

She doesn't. “I'm—Gene's outside, he's waiting for me.”

The lie is obvious, and Sam ignores it. “How many of you are there?”

“You're in pain,” she says. “You're not alone. Listen--”

“I'm _fine_ ,” Sam says, keeps his voice clear but she's not wrong is the thing. He's in trouble. Keeping the gun at this height is fucking with the cuts on his chest, pulling pain and he was never as good with his left hand anyway, the sight trembling across her body. He brings up his cast up for support. “Tell me what's going on here.”

“We're helping,” she says, leaning forward. “We can--”

“How is this helping?”

Her eyes narrow.

“Young man,” she says, voice stronger. “You've got no idea what _this_ is.”

“So tell me,” Sam says, and scans the room. Bare white tile, the rolling guerneys. No rope he can see, and nothing to really fix her to anyway; maybe the exposed pipes—are they gas, though? Where do they go? He should have brought cuffs, he's so stupid. He swipes his hair out of his eyes again and she tilts her head. 

“Would you be ready to listen?”

“I'm all ears.” Sam adjusts his grip and pulls his phone, goes for the speed dial and her eyes flick behind him, at the door. He reflexively looks. 

Flinches back but her first shot is wild anyway, through her bag, her hand plunged inside, three more shots that scream, deafening, off the tiles, hit nothing. He ducks to the side, arms up and his gun out of line as she hisses, snatches her hand out, burned, and throws the whole thing at him, charges behind. Hits him before he shoots, two to her chest but her momentum takes him down anyway and something breaks, tears, wet on his chest, her blood or his he doesn't know.

He shoves her weight off and pushes up, coughing, his ribs cramping. Blood in his mouth hits the top of his throat as he gasps, making him gag.

She sucks in breath that looks like it hurts, wet, spluttering. Claws a hand towards him and he scoots backwards out of range until he hits the wall.

It takes her a minute, almost a full minute to die; there's some writhing, groaning. More human than the creatures he usually watches go. He keeps his feet out of her blood and wipes his forehead, clammy. Lifts his shirt; he's popped a few stitches in his belly but it's not critical, it's just pain and that's nothing new.

“Devil,” she gasps, pushing towards him. “ _Devil_.” She gropes for his hands and he pulls his cast away and leaves the other for her to squeeze, weak, blood slicking like a glove. Her voice drops, lips pulled, the grimace of a deathbed confession. Her tears make tracks. “Jesus forgive me, God forgive me.”

She disappears into whispers, untraceable even when he bends down close over her mouth, feeling her last breath leave her, a bubble on her lips. There's enough monster in him to mourn her, briefly. 

Standing, he takes one step and his vision spots, a swooning in his ears and a gentle greying. His head bounces off the floor, and that's the end of that.

::

Ratface's car hates him.

Sam turns the key and listens to it whine and screech. It is not accommodating, of his wishes or his body or the flatiron lay of the land, tilting him forward as his hand rolls the key again. Screech screech, whine whine. Yadda yadda.

He gets out and waits for his brain to catch up to his skull. It hurts when it arrives.

The hood pops and he stares down at the maze underneath it, grimy and bewildering. His hands run an intake tube, source to sea, branches and estuaries and his fingers blurring. It doesn't make sense; it's too hard.

He yawns, huge, skin stretching and a lance of pain at the back of his head.

Her car is parked on the other side of the building, around the front. It's a hearse. Locked, he finds, annointing it in oil and grease. In the back, where the bodies go, he catches sight of a bulky roll of picnic blanket, cheerful fringed ends and grey hair and a wrinkled forehead and a pale glassy eye found by the light, tell-tale, fixed on him. 

Eugene Greer. Murdered, murdered, accusatory, and his head swells and pounds and nausea surfaces, surges up the back of his throat and presses. On his knees, he throws up. Mostly water. It spills underneath the hearse and there's no one to help him clean it.

His phone is ringing. 

His teeth are chattering. It's really late. Dark. Rain threatening in the air. He's sitting on the concrete curb out front, where the parade comes, waiting for his concussion to fade.

His phone is ringing. He answers.

“You're a stubborn son of a bitch, you know that?” Dean hisses in his ear, after a while. Hangs up before Sam can agree, and time on time, the Impala rolls along and Dean leans to glare daggers through the passenger window. 

The light spikes too, off her paint and chrome, makes Sam wince, raise his cast and then the car is creaking and he's on Sam.

“Think she tore my stitches,” Sam says, as Dean tilts his chin up, pulls at his eyelids. “No, my stitches, in my, in my--” and his breath catches as Dean's fingers pad careful and soft around the back of his head and finds the bump. “Ow.”

“You're gonna be the fucking end of me,” Dean mutters. There's beer on his breath.

“Be the end of yourself, you drunk,” Sam says, and Dean huffs and kneels at Sam's feet, starts on his shirt, lifting, poking, but Sam's still held together. Mostly, anyway, and Dean gives up on making sense of him, folds his arms across Sam's knees and puts his face down. Hides himself, bare-necked. Sam pats the back of his head, pushing fingers through his short soft hair, gets blood and all who knows what on him. Transferral of properties. Does that make them the same?

“I shoulda known,” Dean says, muffled.

“'Cause I told you. I told you this place was involved,” Sam says. Dean shakes his hand off and sits back on his heels, in a crouch, palms balanced on Sam's knees, staring at Sam, unreadable. He's so bright, even with clouds over the moon. His lashes, his lips. It hurts, right now, to have him like this and no further. It's not fair. “You should listen to me.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean sighs, brow furrowed, trying to be cross. “I also seem to remember something about not going around killing them, genius.” He sniffs, waves his hand. “Gimme your gun.”

Sam pulls it from his pocket and then hangs on, suspicious. “Why?”

“Because you're brain damaged, Sam, give it to me.”

He just plucks it from Sam's grip in the end, and Sam watches him check the safety, the chamber and clip. Pause, eyes lowered. Tucks it at the small of his back and jerks his head away to avoid Sam reaching out to touch. “Stop it. You load up on silver like I told you to?”

“I think so.”

Dean bites his lip. “Jesus. What am I gonna do with you?”

“Don't.”

“Don't what?”

“Hate me,” Sam mumbles, overcome, heavy and sleepy. Another long pause, and Sam's eyes fall shut. The darkness reels like it's drunk too.

“Oh, kiddo.” Dean's voice is thick. “That ship has sailed.” Sam shakes his head, brain sloshing; presses the heel of his palm to his temple. “Only thing I hate more is tuna salad.”

“Tuna,” Sam moans, stomach turning again, and movement and he opens his eyes to see Dean rising tall into another sphere. Pulling his phone and telling Sam to stay put and not fuck up, like that was something ever within Sam's capacity.

Dean peers into the hearse, phone to his ear. Doesn't take the sight as bad as Sam. Less of a guilty conscience, maybe. Flicks his flashlight on, surrenders himself to the building like Jonah and his whale and comes out again looking grim. Spends a while pacing. Takes two cigarettes down to their filters. Sam tracks him like a tennis match, eyes aching.

“Where'd you get that piece of shit?” Dean says at one point, reappearing from around the corner of the building. Sam says huh? for a while, scratching at the stitches on his chest. Dean slaps his hand away.

“The Corolla.”

“Oh. The, the guy. The rat, you know.”

“Sure, okay,” Dean frowns at him. Checks his eyes again, pulls them wide as more lights swing into the lot.

“You called Bobby?” Sam slurs, hurt, and the door opens, but it's Joy who climbs out, Joy alone, eyes flashing in her dark face, her hands on her hips as she surveys them and thunder cracks the sky above.

::

He sits in the car like a good little brother while they talk. The rain melts the windows, and he goes.

When he returns the car is dipping with Dean's weight, drum exploding in his ears, softening as the door closes. The engine takes over. Dean's hands are on the wheel, two and ten, like there are things he needs to be on defence for in here. It hurts, and he closes his eyes and holds his belly where the stitches popped. It doesn't make anything better.

“Hey.” Dean snaps his fingers in front of his nose. “No sleep until we get back, jackass.”

Joy, lit by her own truck, has a duffel slung over her shoulder and a look on her face, glancing through the windshield at them as she crosses in front, that Sam can't focus on long enough to parse.

He leans his head against the window and stares at her back, smug. “Told you so,” he says, even though she can't hear.

“Trebek of the Midwest over here,” Dean says under his breath, and flips on the wipers, slings his elbow over the seat and twists to reverse out of there. The amulet glints on its string and rain shadow dapples his cheek, his neck and Christ, Sam loves him, with an ache so bone-deep he sometimes forgets it's there at all. 

“Dean?”

“Yeah?” Dean flicks him a glance, cautious.

“Do you forgive me?”

“I got a goddamn head case for a brother,” Dean says, turning back to the road, taking off into second. “Who knew.”

“Dad knew,” Sam says, and something hard and dark slams down over Dean's face.

“I told you to lay off the Dad crap.”

“You ever think…”

“What?” Dean snaps.

_I'm glad he's not here_. But it's not fair to ask when he knows the answer. Dean would have him back in a heartbeat. Dean would bring him back in even with Sam in this sorry state and consequences be damned. Dean needs him.

Sam needs him too but if it's either or he knows his choice. A good chunk of his guilt comes from not feeling too guilty about that. 

“I'm sorry.”

“I changed my mind, go to sleep.”

The night hides his exhaustion; he looks young, smooth-faced. He _is_ young, Sam remembers; it's something he always forgets. All the weight he carries, his strength. Not even thirty.

Sam just wants to make him feel good. That's all it is. That's all he'd ever ask for. Dean is a hero and the best thing in Sam's world and he deserves to feel good. 

“You're my brother,” Sam says, sinking, underwater, out of time.

“Tell me something I don't know,” Dean says, tries to put a sarcastic edge on it but it shifts into a tired sigh that wraps Sam like a straitjacket, and they follow the headlights into the storm.


	2. Examine diligently, therefore, all the faculties of your soul.

It was night, and morning, and the rain didn't stop, and Dean wouldn't leave him alone. He just wanted to sleep, but Dean kept pestering, and the thunder kept cracking his skull, and at one point Ratface thumped on the door and tried to shove himself past the unbreakable span of Dean's shoulders. 

His head hurts, and his belly hurts, but Dean won't let him have the good stuff. Denies him every time he asks, and he tells Dean to go away each time Dean pokes him out of unconsciousness; go away a hundred times, a million times go away, I don't need you, I don't want you, and Dean says I know. I know, Sam, so quiet it might be in his head entirely. That's what he remembers as the sun reaches its unambitious height, breaks through cloud, and Dean hands him pills and a bottle of juice, and won't shift from in front until he's downed the lot.

::

At the corner of a park behind the municipal buildings, Joy and his brother sprawl across the bench of a damp picnic table and chow down on chili fries. Sam fishes a fruit-and-nut bar out of his pocket and sits as far away as he can, keeps his eyes down.

Half of his daydreams start with Dean with his legs spread like that. 

They're all cradling coffee. Joy has suitcases under her eyes. She looks beat, and Sam knows for a fact they aren't any prettier. The back of his head is so tender that the wind stirring his hair shoots nerve-lines of pain across his scalp.

“Her husband,” she says. “Greer. Dead at least two days.”

Sam looks at her. “Who's dead?”

“From last night,” Dean says, wiping his fingers on his jeans. “This morning, whatever.” Stirs his coffee down, lets the empty sugar packets fly right away. He's calmer today, on the outside. Sam knows him too well to believe it goes deep. “The body in the hearse.”

Sam frowns. He doesn't remember a body but there's something, something about being seen that makes his head throb, creeping cold wash down the back of his neck like the blood's started again. He pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to crack his jaw, relieve some pressure.

“Did you notice?” Joy says. “Blunt force trauma.”

“Personal,” Dean says, and she nods.

“Somehow I doubt it was just marriage trouble. And then we got this,” she says, upending a handbag onto the table, four bullet holes in the end and small pistol and a jingling tangle of jewellery and keys, lanyards and wallets and name badges falling out in a lump.

Sam digs through the mess. Some local addresses and a couple of vaguely familiar faces; a security guard ID; badge with a name from the local ribs 'n' wings joint; a key to the library.

Joy reaches over him and plucks a card out, a smiling woman and a blue scrolling logo, Teacher and Student Counsellor at the illustrious Trent Middle and High. “Don't three or four of these families on your list have kids here?” 

“Every kid in town goes there,” Sam says. “She at work today?”

She tosses the card back and returns to her lunch. “Not today. I called the school. But yesterday? Bet your ass.”

“I don't recognise all these names,” Sam says. “Are they locals too? Do you know?” She chews slowly at him and swallows. Christ alive, what an asshole. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“Hang on,” she says, huffs through her nose. “I got a county directory in my truck.” 

Dean salutes with his coffee as she rises.

“How do you know she's not a shifter?” Sam asks, low, lifting his phone and taking a photo of her. Not a good one; grainy, low res. But her eyes, fixed on a guy walking his dog near the cars, are visible. Nothing weird.

“How do I know _you're_ not a shifter?”

“Fuck you,” Sam mutters, and Dean sighs, turns away from him and rests his elbows back on the table. Lowers his sunglasses against the bright white sky, winter humming along crisp in the air. Scratches at his cheek, awkward.

“Listen, Sam. Something I gotta...that woman last night.” 

“The shifter?”

“She wasn't a shifter.”

Sam lays his phone carefully on table and looks at Dean. Even with his eyes hidden he gives the impression that he's squinting out across the park, towards the mountains in the distance.

“How do you know?” Sam asks, hollow. 

“Bullets weren't silver.”

“Oh.” God, he can barely remember her, was there—what's wrong with him, how could he not have known? She'd attacked him, he knows that, she'd attacked him, shot at him and they'd waited for the end on the floor, together. 

She'd cried. He hadn't even tried to stop the blood.

“Oh? That's it?” Dean raises his glasses, pins him with a disturbed look, but Joy's back and his lips press closed. 

She tosses the directory to land with a thump in front of Sam and the last bite of his hoarded lunch tiddlywinks right off the table.

“You wanna take pictures Stanford, you only have to ask.”

Sam bows his head before the shock can hit his face. Dean talking about him to her, were they laughing, were they drinking and laughing about how stupid he is, about the poison he carried there? About what a freak he is?

“All right, all right,” Dean says, doesn't even have the decency to look guilty. “Sam, you were talking colonies before, resettlement. Still think that?”

Not really, hearing it laid out so plain in middle of the day, Joy's eyes narrowed at him and human blood on his hands. “Maybe,” he says. “What's your guess?”

“My guess is this bodycount's gonna grow,” she says, scooping the table clear, sweeping the mess of badges and wallets back into the bag. “I don't know about you two, but generally? I look for the fucking things, and then I kill them.”

“It's a bit more complicated than that--” Sam starts, heated, fighting through the words, and Dean stands.

“So what,” he says, too loud, and drains his coffee. “We go see where this teacher chick's been hanging, who she's been talking to. You got a line in with any phone companies?” Joy shakes her head and Dean shrugs. “Okay, we do it the old-fashioned way.”

Putting on the suit, driving around with them both, wearing his concerned face. Sam would rather shoot himself.

“You guys follow up on this teacher. One of us should check out the Greer place.”

“Good idea,” Dean says. “We can roll by there first.”

“No, I don't—I can do it myself. I need to go to the library too.”

“Again?” Dean frowns at him. “For what?”

“Research,” Sam grits out, digging splinters out the tabletop with his thumbnail, cheek sucked hard between his teeth. Is it too much to ask, to be in a dark room by himself for a couple of hours?

“Well, you're not going alone,” Dean says. 

“Jesus wept,” Joy mutters, and stands, zips up her jacket. “I'll take the teacher.”

Sam ignores her, glares at him. “I'm not gonna shoot anyone else if that's what you're worried about.”

“Have you seen yourself?” Dean says, scornful. “You're about as dangerous as a Cabbage Patch Kid,” but Sam hears what's underneath: _you're a poorly-sutured blood bag and you're a stranger to me, so it's my job to keep you in line whether I like it or not._

::

“Hey Bobby,” he says, checks down the staircase and pauses, listening. Dean's still clattering around down there in the kitchen. “You ever heard of a hunter named Joy?”

“There gonna be a punchline to this?”

“She's here. I sent you a photo.” 

“Hang on.” 

Thumps and rustles from Bobby's end, a keyboard clacking. Sam heads down the hall into the master bedroom. Big wooden furniture, same as the rest of the house; quilts and tchotchkes and a doily or two. This house is desperately dull, and looks to have been human to the end. The shed was clear, and the cellar; nothing anywhere that indicated shifters. 

“Yeah, I've seen her before,” Bobby says. “Can't confirm the name, but I reckon she worked a job with a guy I know down 'round Ensenada a few years back. Shifters.”

“Shifters then too?”

“Mhmm. She talking much about how to run this?”

“She's tried to steer us a couple of times. I don't know, she cleaned up my mess last night, she's been helpful.” 

“Too helpful?”

“I don't know,” Sam says, and there's a pause on the other end. He opens the closet to an explosion of plaid, thick winter jackets and animal scent.

“She's fine in the photo.”

“Yeah, but.” Sam bites his lip. “What if she's wearing contacts or something?”

Bobby sighs. “Listen, Sam.” 

“You think I'm paranoid.”

“Hey, paranoid is good. Saved my ass more than once. But these kind of jobs get in your head.”

Sam scrubs at his face, elbows shut the closet door and turns around. “You realise you just told me to be paranoid about myself.”

Bobby chuckles. “That's just being human. I'll make a call or two.”

“Thanks, Bobby.”

“How's your brother?”

Sam looks down at Debbie Greer's bedside table: a glass of water, a weekly pill-box; church pamphlets stacked atop a Bible. “He's. You know.”

“Give him time.”

“He doesn't...”

“What?”

_Like me anymore._

“Nothing.”

Bobby clears his throat. “All right, kid. Look out for yourself. I'll call if I hear anything.”

He closes his phone as Dean comes thumping up the stairs and saunters in, leans his hip on the dresser, open pack of M&Ms in his hand. Eyes a cheap reproduction on the wall, Adam and Eve, figleaves and a lurking serpent and the nubs of Renaissance breasts. Sam waits for a comment but Dean stares right through her. 

Sam looks down, lifts the cover on the Bible and gets hit by that new book smell. 

“Well,” Dean says, cracking a yawn, his mouth disgusting. “Found a frypan in the bin with a fair amount of brains on it, but that's about it. What's the old man got to say?”

“Your girlfriend likes working shifter jobs,” Sam says, and he doesn't even intend it meanly, it just rolls off his tongue but Dean stills, straightens, bag crinkling in his hand.

“Can you just,” he says, tight, “be— _normal_. We just gotta get through this job and then we'll, we'll figure something out, Sam, but I just need, could you just be fuckin normal for once.”

Sam looks out the bedroom window, sets his sights on the horizon, the mountains rising into cloud. It blurs. Patently, the answer is no, but he doesn't think Dean wants to hear it, and he has no idea what an acceptable reply might be. 

Dean sighs, heavy and endless.

What if Sam gave up? Just plain gave up? Said You know it now Dean, make your choice. Can you live with knowing? Can you live with me? Can you even like me? Who do you need me to _be?_

If Sam were a shifter of Sam, God, how much easier.

The visions would go. The demons wouldn't want him anymore. He wouldn't be falling apart. He wouldn't be this hopeless. 

He could sit next to Dean and it wouldn't turn him inside out. He could look at his brother and it wouldn't do anything to him at all.

“So,” Dean says, quiet. “The library?”

Sam closes the Bible. Jesus forgive me, God forgive me, Debbie Greer cries, through the blood clotting in her throat, ringing in his ears, his temples throbbing.

“No,” he says, and looks at Dean, and Dean holds his gaze, steady and tired and reserved, back straight under the weight of his duties and Sam is so bad for him; they both know it. Sam is bad for the world in general but Dean in particular. Sam is going to ruin his brother if they stay on like this. “I think we'd better go to church.”

::

In his dreams and his daydreams, Sam wears out his knees.

In his dreams and his daydreams, Dean knows he's looking, and lets him look. Dean's legs have fallen apart, in the car, on a chair at the motel table, standing, propped against the wall in a grimy diner bathroom. On a stool at a bar, heels wedged in the crossbar. Jeans tight around his thighs and his hand fallen casual so his fingertips graze the inner seam. He leans back. Sam's mouth waters. He kneels.

He doesn't let it go past that very often, lately. Past the offer. They're dangerous, his dreams, extrapolating from reality. He's not entirely stupid. He knows he needs to put a stop to them. He's tried. He fled them across state lines. He found another person to love and got her killed. He's tried the starvation cure, the immersion cure. He's appealed to his disgust. His fear. His own better nature, what there is of it. Once at school he walked right up to the edge of appealing to some poor stranger in the counselling service. He has even, at times, been desperate and drunk enough to appeal to God. 

Sam has examined his dreams for meaning, for symbol. For some sign that they weren't what they were, that this thing he had for his brother was a stand-in for something else. Something purer. Cleaner. Liveable. 

How could it be bad? His dreams ask. He would go to his knees. He would help Dean forget, for as long as he could, how mean their lives are, how dirty. He'd make Dean smile, pant, feel good. Dean would touch him gladly. The world would be simple.

It's a joke. There's nothing simple or pure or liveable about it. His dreams have him so far surrendered to Dean that there's nothing left of himself to call compromised.

Sometimes, a similar thing happens in his nightmares. Those ones have a lot more blood.

::

REJOICE WITH ME  
I HAVE FOUND  
MY LOST SHEEP  
-Lk 15:6

St Augustine's has a new sign out the front. It's humble and Catholic, the smaller of the two churches in town and just emerging out of a period of poverty it seems, fresh paint over the clapboard, hedges trimmed back neatly. The houses either side are similarly immaculate. A woodchipper chunks and clatters somewhere down the street, floating in on the breeze, interrupting the birds.

It's so _normal_.

“I thought we ruled out religion,” Dean says, as they crunch up into the gravel lot. “Remember? Half the people on our list don't go. Those kids, and that family by the river.”

Sam punches the glovebox and grabs the reporter notebook, a pen, his gun. “The other place is Latter Day Saints, right?”

“Utah's two minutes that way, what do you think?”

“Anyone on the list go there?”

“Don't think so?” Dean frowns out the window. “Hey, check out Emo McGee over there,” he says, nods his head at kid perched on a bench on the other side of the lot. Buried in a book and black hair out of a drugstore packet.

Sam snorts. “See if he'll talk? I'll take a look inside.”

Dean hums affirmation, eyes fixed on the kid. “Be careful,” he says; rote, unconscious, but it shivers through Sam like absolution, burns in his palms, and he hurries out of the car before he does something abject and irreversible like grab him by the hand or neck and start begging.

Four o'clock on a Wednesday and the building is empty, the pews readied for service. It's a bright little building, and showing the same signs of recent improvement inside, floorboards varnished and squeaking. He ventures down the centre aisle. The altar cloth is fresh and white. A rattle and hum seeps in from somewhere out back: an old heater struggling to warm the air, or maybe a fridge in the parish hall. 

Christ on the crucifix averts his gaze from Sam.

Sam hasn't prayed so much since they hit Trent. He's not sure God wants to hear from him at the moment.

The Bible on the lectern is open to the same parable as the sign out front. The vestry is empty and plain, shelves dustless, communion cup and saucer clean and ready for use. The smell of incense pervades, thick and dizzying.

The confessional, in the chapel, is mahogany, elaborate and Old World.

“How long has it been?”

A man's voice, startling in the quiet. The priest. Sam recognises him from his original research on the town, fit and middle-aged, dark hair and a square pleasant face, the habitual pastoral frown of concern creasing his forehead.

“Oh, Father, hello.” Sam straightens his jacket, tries to look a little less guilty. “I'm sorry, was it--”

“Duncan,” he says, reaching to shake hands, grins when Sam holds up his cast apologetically. “Dear me.”

“You're telling me,” Sam says, dry. “Father, my name is Sam Howard. I'm doing a profile on Trent for the _Statesman_ , talking to community leaders, and so on. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course. Isn't Trent a lovely little town?” Duncan smiles, gestures to the chapel, waits for Sam to sit before pulling a chair close. He's in jeans and button-down, and leans forward confidentially. “Well, maybe a little dull for a bright young man like yourself, but we like it.”

Sam would burn this place to the ground if he could get away with it. He plasters a smile on his face. “Oh I agree, it's great. I love the, ah, park.” He coughs. “You've been here a while?”

“Nearly thirty years, now.” He frowns. “Are you sure you're comfortable, on these old chairs? You look a little worse for wear.”

“I'm fine, thank you,” Sam says, fishes in his pocket for the notepad. “Have you noticed any changes in your congregation over the last couple of months?”

“Our outreach has been very successful lately, if that's what you mean?” He smiles again and Sam scratches his nose and tries to return it. His headache returns with a crack and presses a knuckle to his temple, blinks down at his notepad and tries to get himself in order.

“You know, I was talking to Mr and Mrs Greer just the other day, and they said how much they enjoyed attending.”

“Eugene said that?” He tilts his head. “I'm pleased to hear it. Debbie usually comes alone.”

“Well—it was mostly her, yes,” Sam says, and Duncan chuckles.

“She is very devoted to our cause.”

“Your cause?”

“Lifting the burden.” He floats his hands in the air in a way that Sam supposes looks like lifting burdens. The guy's a bit much but a lot of people in this line are, in Sam's experience, and short of shooting him Sam's not sure how to tell if he's showing his true face.

“Lifting the burden,” he echoes, and chews on his lip. Checks his watch. Dean has got to be close to done, if the kid was willing to talk at all. “How do you do that?”

“The usual ways.” Duncan indicates the confessional. “I noticed you avoided my question.”

The booth has thick purple velvet curtains drawn back on the compartments, set up in an old-fashioned kneeling-style. It makes Sam's flesh crawl. “Has anyone told you anything lately that's caused you concern?”

Duncan stares at him, eyes dark and bottomless; hitches closer. “Son,” he says, voice low. “This isn't about an article. You're in pain.” 

“Um,” Sam says, trying to crane back without it being obvious. “Well I took some Tylenol before, so--”

Duncan hums, amused. “It's not the flesh I'm concerned with. You know, Sam, most people are a mystery to themselves.” His voice rings, uncanny, with true belief. “Do you know why you're hurting?”

He is exhausting, muddling, and Sam instincts are a mess; he has not yet recovered from the fifteen blows this town has dealt him. 

He shouldn't be here alone, he thinks, with a petty sense of injury.

“Sam?” Duncan says gently. “Do you know the cause?”

Sam looks up. There's a skylight in here, the air diffuse, dancing with motes, incense, and it makes the the chapel secret, intimate. Pastor Jim had had something similar, Sam remembers with a pang; he and Dean had lain underneath and watched the clouds move, hours on hours, stolen chocolate melting into their clothes, shuffling along so they stayed in the sun, pressed together, and Sam had loved his brother with the wholesale dedicate purity of a child.

“Father,” he says, hesitant. “If someone told you something bad, in there, something—the worst thing you could imagine, what would you do?”

“Counsel and absolve.” 

He says it like it's simple and Sam drops his eyes to his hands, swallows past the questions lumping in his throat. But what if it's unforgiveable? What if they can't change? How could you look at them again? How could you see a person you used to--

“Well isn't this cosy.” 

Sam rockets to his feet, heart pounding, his face burning. 

Dean is leaning on the altar. 

He grins like a shark, like it will soften his tone, his sharp eyes. Duncan stands, unhurried, his smile unchanged, his hand out; Dean presses his palm with stupid macho emphasis. “Father Duncan, right? Been hearing a lot about you.”

“All good, I hope.”

“Oh,” Dean scoffs. “ _Glowing_. If you'll excuse us, I need to borrow my colleague here.”

He claps Sam on the shoulder. Tugs at his jacket and starts off without a reply, expectant, commanding. 

Sam slots his notepad away and steps up out of the chapel. “Thanks for your time, Father.”

“Sam,” Father Duncan calls, and Sam turns, reaching for the altar to steady himself. “I'm here to serve.” His eyes flash, with fervour or purpose or truth or the devil of his nature, Sam's in no state to tell. “How can I serve them without knowing their souls?”

::

The kid, Dean informs him in the car, as Sam winds down the window and tries to breathe clear air, is having a hard time: with school, with his brothers, with other shitheel kids. His parents keep sending him to church to—Dean pulls his hands off the wheel for emphatic quotes— _volunteer_. Like Mrs Greer, they're converts. The congregation is swelling.

He shouldn't complain, the kid had said. They'd stopped drinking. They'd stopped arguing. The house is cleaner. The lawn is mown. Father Duncan had gotten his dad a job at the Sinclair on North First. 

Sam tries to remember if they've stopped in there. He has a vague memory of faded paint and a Coke sign. 

“So what,” Dean says, tapping his fingers as they halt at a listing stop sign, cemented into two huge tyres. “Now we gotta go gank mom and or dad?” 

“Yeah, but are they actually shifters? Or are they just— _happier_?”

“This fucking town,” Dean mutters, pulling out onto Main behind a tractor struggling to hit twenty. He raises his voice. “Hey, you better not be heading for the highway, pal. We're agreed Father Creepy is on the list?”

Sam nods. “At the top.”

“And we're not putting a bullet in him because…?”

Sam shifts, uneasy. “It doesn't make sense, Dean. All those names from Bobby: they were changed too, but they were human. We tried them with silver.”

“Did you try him with silver?”

“No. Although, the communion gear was stainless steel.”

“Not exactly a slam dunk.” Dean purses his lips. “Maybe it's not even shifters?”

“You killed one with my face on it,” Sam says. Dean flinches, fracture in his eyes and Sam turns away, as the streetlights start to flicker on, dim and overwhelmed still by the dusk. The bank is closing; half a dozen men and women scatter from the front door. The guard calls to a woman in a neat grey uniform and they wave goodbye to each other. They seem fine. They seem normal.

How many burdens to lift, Sam thinks. How many souls to save. He'll never know any of them. Even if he clears this town of its monsters, they'll live the same lives. Didn't that used to be a comfort?

He touches the knot on the back of his head gingerly and wishes he was elsewhere, anywhere. It's not working like a normal job, it's too hard. His thoughts won't line up.

“You haven't figured this out by tomorrow, Sam,” Dean says, voice ground down, implacable and unpleasant,“we're doing it my way.”

::

Sam finishes writing their names, awkward capitals down the pad. He still hasn't learned how to write easily with his cast.

Blue for confirmed human. Black for deceased, red for missing. Sixteen crosses for known members of St Augustine's. Ten or so connected to the school, with a bit of crossover. Several live in the same two-block radius; they're marked by an asterisk. Three of the names are new, found in the tangle of IDs and wallets Mrs Greer had been lugging around. Six used to work at the PVC factory, back in the day.

Thirty-four all told. 

“Mrs Greer,” he says, closes the directory and tosses the last license on the pile, rubs his eyes. “She killed her husband. Why?”

“He found something out,” Dean says. He pulls the pad from under Sam's hands, stands frowning down at the list, glass in his other hand. “Or he didn't want to join the gang.”

“The gang,” Sam says, slowly, and smothers a yawn. “Like, a cult?”

Dean shrugs. “So who came after us in the factory?” 

“Chase, is my guess.” Useful occupation, the real guy out of state, easy to take over his life. Tight with the Greers and other community notables. Sam frowns and twists the lid off his beer, tosses it in the direction of the bin. “Maybe we made him nervous. You know, I don't think we're dealing with that many after all.” 

Dean was right. They've got to take a shot at Duncan. If this is a cult and not an occupation then it might be safer to make a move than he thought, and he'd put hard money down that Duncan was at the head of it.

Tomorrow. Dean jumped straight to hard liquor tonight, and Sam needs a good four hours of sleep to be functional. Their cover is wearing thin but it's held this far and should hold a little longer. Tomorrow, and then this can be over.

He takes a pull of his beer, looks up to say so and catches Dean staring, eyes on Sam's lips, colour on his cheeks and that's, it's too much. Wrench in his stomach and his breath catches and maybe Dean hears it, blinking, tossing the list on the table. He turns away and starts texting. 

Joy, goddamn Joy again. No sign of the teacher, she'd informed them, so who knew what she was doing all afternoon.

“Ask if she was a churchgoer,” Sam says, working to keep the shake out of his voice. “That teacher,” and Dean punches at his phone, face set, unreadable. It buzzes after a moment.

“No.”

“That's it? No?”

“You want it in limerick form?”

“You know she's not telling us everything,” Sam says. Dean snorts, bitter and short and the injustice cuts Sam deep. He grits his teeth. “This is Gordon Walker all over again. You see that right? It's gonna end the same way.”

“Jealous?”

“You--” Sam stutters, barely able to see. “ _You_ —you're so desperate for validation, Dean, you'll take anyone that looks at you twice and _I'm_ right here, I'm right--”

“This guy,” Dean taps at a name on the pad, “and Emo's dad, they were highschool buddies. We'll go check it out.” 

“ _Fuck_.” Sam sweeps the table with his cast, directory and IDs and all, a nice solid connection, paper a fluttering rush and the thwack of leather and keys, his phone banging against the skirting. Dean doesn't blink.

“You're gonna need that.”

“You can't go around stirring shit _now_ ,” Sam snaps. “It'll get back to them. And Duncan knows you by sight.”

Dean raises a bland eyebrow. “You're out of your gourd if you think I'm gonna sit here twiddling my thumbs all night.”

“When was the last time you slept for two straight hours? It's such a bad idea.”

“Bad ideas are all I got,” Dean says, tossing his drink back and grabbing his keys. “Put some goddamn silver in your clip this time.”

“Asshole,” Sam hisses as the door shuts, impotent and petty, but he double-checks his clip and the backup guns, fuming, hating himself. He picks up the mess he made and stares at his new list, searching for connections amongst the names, chasing down four of them to arrest reports April '05-Sept '05 before stalling out into a dead end. He takes his pills and checks his stitches, testing the heat of the skin. He gets a text from Dean, _Emo & co clear goin fishing_, and doesn't reply. He lays down and can't get comfortable, the back of his head too sore and then his cuts complaining when he turns over. 

He doesn't sleep. He's fairly sure he doesn't, but then the door and keys jangling, and Sam has his hand under his pillow, resting on his gun before he's fully conscious.

Dean moves wrong, unsure of his feet. He's drunk, or there's someone else in his body, scraping the chain across, shucking his jacket so it thumps onto the floor. He teeters down gracelessly into the space between their beds and settles back against the bedside table, ripe with the smell of booze and cigarettes. He's mostly a shadow, eyes gleaming in the dark.

“What are you doing?” Sam murmurs, thick with sleep. The clock radio says 02:48 and he rolls on his side to face Dean and resigns himself to another night of deficient sleep. “Get in your bed.”

“I ever tell you about Rhonda Hurley?”

Sam lets go the gun and scrubs at his eyes. “Who?”

“Back in '98,” Dean says. He's fighting the slur and losing. He sounds exhausted. “She was something.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Made me wear her panties.”

“I'm going to pretend I never heard that,” Sam says, brightly awake now, blood rushing in his ears and his brother shifts, restless.

“Kinda liked it.”

“Shut up, man, I don't wanna know,” Sam says. Dean huffs a frustrated breath. “Keep your sexcapades to yourself.” He can't even picture it. It's beyond the bounds of belief.

The top of Dean's head moves, a nod, the brightest part of him, the architecture of his hair glowing faintly red by the clock. They're quiet a long time and Sam's brain won't stop turning on this new world of his brother's, some girl years ago and panties, panties for Christ's sake, what is Dean trying to do, what is he trying to do to him?

“You didn't even care that you killed that woman,” Dean mumbles, another left-field blow and now Sam has to deal with that too. Has it even been a day? Can't he get a minute's peace?

“Don't say that.”

“You're supposed to...cry, or something. Agonise.”

Sam scoots closer to the edge of the mattress. It creaks alarmingly. Dean is just a series of shadows and Sam lashes down, fast and frantic, an overwhelming impulse to reach out to his face, to run his fingers over and find his thoughts in the shape of it.

“She tried to shoot me,” he manages, instead. “Would you rather I was dead?”

“Jesus, Sam, no, I just—promise me you'll care.”

Sam takes a deep breath and tries to keep the sorrow out of his voice. “I promise.”

“I don't know what to do,” Dean says, so honestly confused Sam aches for him. 

“Just go to bed,” he says. “Get some sleep.”

“I can't, I can't stop--” Dean cuts himself off, and Sam's so broken, this godforsaken place has broken Sam. Exposing him to the sun has just made him worse.

“C'mere,” he breathes, on a precipice, _let me help, I can help you_ , and the room crushes him, the dark, presses him down like a hand, every cell in his body alive and in dread, the air so thick he can barely pull it in. Dean shifts, minutely, a hush of clothing. His breathing changes and the seconds tick out. Sam burns.

“No,” Dean whispers eventually.

Sam rolls over, away, down into the saggy middle. “Then shut up and go to sleep.”

“Yes, _sir_ ,” Dean says to his back, bitter. Sam closes his eyes. The other side of this job, the bit where it's done and they leave: being in the car with him, taking motel rooms, sitting in a diner ordering pie like it's just another day, like Sam hasn't taken an axe to the base of the only thing that sustains him: it's impossible, unbearable, yawning a ragged black void. He can't see a way through.

Maybe it doesn't matter if Dean still likes him. If Dean can even live with him.

If he's gonna be honest, the real question is, has always been: can you live without me?


	3. Gave away his heart like it was his to give away.

The phone shrieks, battering the silence. Sam cracks his eyes open to a bright early morning and knocks the handset off its cradle.

Ratface on the other end, when he finally brings it to his ear. “Winchester.”

“Can I help you?” He sits with a grunt, presses his hand to his temple. Over in the other bed Dean is pretending to sleep it off, covers pulled high, his back to Sam.

“You got a package here.”

“A package?”

“From Bobby Singer.” He even sounds sweaty. “Look, are you gonna come pick it up?”

Sam grabs at the Tylenol on the bedside table, dry-swallows a couple and regrets it instantly, croaks around the lump in his throat, trying not to gag. “You've got to be kidding.” 

“Keep it down,” Dean mumbles, pulling the covers over his head. Sam gives him the finger.

“I'm not gonna hang around all day waiting for you.”

Sam sighs. “How do you know about Bobby?”

A pause. “Because there's a package.”

“Did you think you could get away with it forever?” he says, and there's another pause, and when Ratface speaks again it's in a growl, coarse with anger.

“Did you?”

Sam closes his eyes and feels himself sway a little. Maybe not. But he'd hoped.

“I'm coming,” he says. “Stay there. I'm coming.”

He hangs up. Pulls his gun from under his pillow, scrubs through his hair and tries to pinch himself awake.

“Dean,” he says, putting his jacket on, shoving his feet into his boots. Gets no response. He shakes Dean's foot. “Lock the chain behind me.” Dean groans and his head emerges, his mouth moving, distasteful. “Make sure it's me before you open up. Are you listening?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he rasps, rubbing at his race. “What, they've got you again?”

“One of us. I think so.” Sam twitches the curtains and peers outside, blinks as his eyes adjust, painful. No movement, nothing weird, but he can't see into reception. 

“ _Shifters_ ,” Dean mutters, pushing himself up to sitting. When Sam glances over he's propped on his hands, wincing in the direction of the window, skin grey, his hair pointing in eight hundred different directions. Sam shakes his head.

“Remind me later to tell you you're a fucking idiot,” he says, and bends to check the spyhole, pulls the security chain.

“Hey Sam,” Dean says, quiet, behind him, and Sam stares down at his hand on the doorknob, the back of his neck prickling. “I'm an idiot.”

“I know,” Sam says, and opens the door.

::

It's quiet outside. Their car is alone in the lot. He keeps close to the building, under the porch, walks along to reception.

It's empty. At first glance.

Sam looks down at the body behind the counter, and sighs. Facedown in blood and nearly naked, the pale mottled skin of his back and his grey jocks. One sock hangs off his foot. 

First Sam stole and broke his car, and then Sam got him killed.

His phone rings, shrill and piercing and he flinches, grabs it out of his pocket. Bobby's home number. A landline, so unless one of them high-tailed it to Sioux Falls--

“Hey, Bobby,” he says, flicking a quick check around the room, outside; no sign of alarm or danger.

“Sam. You checked out the church? Arturo says that Ensenada situation was a priest job. He thinks two or three got away.”

“Situation?”

“You ever heard of Franz Mesmer? That kind of situation.”

“Or a cult, like with mostly people? Human people?” Sam nudges the back room open with his gun and flicks the light on, wrinkling his nose. It's a mess in there, but not destroyed; just the disarray of a bored asshole stuck in a dying motel. “I think the priest is involved, but then there's these outliers. A teacher and so on.”

“The teacher one of padre's?”

“Doesn't seem to be.” 

_Ding_ , from behind, the door, and Sam whirls.

Dean is gawking over counter, bedraggled, still in the t-shirt he passed out in, jacket pulled clumsily over. He makes a face, leans back. 

_Maybe I'll skip breakfast_ , Sam thinks, lowering his gun.

“There goes breakfast,” Dean says, crooks a tired smile at Sam, unshaven and red-eyed and still so beautiful, so much Sam's brother, that the strength of Sam's devotion almost knocks him to his knees.

“How can I serve you without knowing your soul?” he whispers, and Dean's smile fades, stunned, his eyes wide on Sam's.

“ _Sam_ ,” he says, wrecked, and Sam's heart socks him in the chest and God help him, his dick stirs and he turns away, puts his hand to his face, gun pressing along the line of his brow and Bobby nattering in his ear and he takes a breath and tells Bobby he's gotta go, he's gotta go, Christ, he's not fit to live.

He snaps his phone shut. Keeps his back to his brother, swallows, fiddles blindly with random bits of paper in the shelves.

“Call Joy,” he says, keeps his voice steady with great effort. “Tell her it's the same as Ensenada. Tell her to find that teacher. It's Duncan and the teacher.”

An endless pause behind him. “That's it?”

“Maybe as well a psychologist or a, a GP, or something, but I think...maybe just the two, considering we already got one.”

“I don't get it.”

Sam wipes his face, turns a little and glances at him. “She was the school counsellor too. These kids, they come to her and they...they _confess_.”

Dean curls his lip, disturbed, and pulls his phone, starts tapping. “So what, they get off on secrets?”

“Yeah...I dunno.” Sam steps around the counter and scans the lot, the road. Still empty, still just the Impala sitting low and square, and the row of fifteen identical rooms. But Duncan, he's sure, is waiting for them somewhere. “Maybe they really think they're helping. Absolving, improving.”

“Better living through caving in your husband's skull?”

“If she was a true believer, and he was resistant...”

“Fuck me,” Dean groans, and leans over the counter again, stretches to peer into the back room. “What's the chance Francis here put the coffee on before he met his maker?”

“You're gross.” Sam steps carefully over the body, checks the desk drawers in vain for a master key.

“I'm hungover as shit is I what I am. And you're barely half a person,” Dean says, cracking his neck, breathing deep, shaking out his shoulders. When he raises his gun he's got his game face on, a sideways rueful grin that he aims at Sam. “What's the worst that could happen?”

::

They clear the reception block first, with great incompetence and zero results. Sam finally digs up a ring of keys in the back office, and they rattle and chime like a percussion section at every step; a maintenance closet, tumbled with brooms and clattering mops, nearly gives Dean a heart attack; the tiny dining room and kitchen nook smell so strongly of rancid pipes that Dean refuses to go in at all.

A door near that leads to a function room, shuttered and dim, stale with long dry disuse, chairs stacked and cobwebbed along the walls. Flipping the light on just makes the shadows more resentful. 

Dean checks behind the bar and coughs, gagging. Leans on the counter, eyes closed. “Well, Francis has left the building.” 

“Man, I'm hungry,” Sam says, sorting through keys on the opposite side of the room, by the sliding door. “I could really go for some rice pudding.” 

“I'll shoot you,” Dean says, weaving across the room, sweaty, pale. “I don't even care.”

Outside is a fenced-off pool, empty but for a thin layer of scummy rainwater and rotting leaves, and the pool shed. Backed-up onto the grass is a van, a soccer-mom people-mover.

“Suitcases. They came to say adios, how sweet,” Dean says, peering through the back window as Sam works on the shed door, tugging to pull it over the weeds that have grown up through the concrete, hinges screeching. “Real subtle, Sam. Think they know we're here?”

Nothing could have gotten inside without them hearing; he gives up and evaluates his options. The building stretches away to his left, high bathroom windows and blank back doors. He doesn't like the idea of clearing the rooms from this side, too blind, but he likes the idea of returning through the reception block even less. 

Unit one's key is marked, and fits the lock. He lifts his gun and turns to call Dean in.

Dean, the delinquent, is stabbing at the wall of the van's tyres. He straightens and twirls his knife, winks at Sam and Sam can't help his mouth twitching in response.

Dean's eyes widen. It's all the warning Sam gets as he's yanked backwards through the door, Dean's alarm and a shape rushing him across the grass, a blur, as Sam's collar catches under his jaw, throttling. His head snaps back. His heels skid. Christ, this thing is strong, and tall, and it throws him to the ground with ease, wrenching jarring thud as his back hits, and his head, his fucking head again, exploding with sledgehammer force. His gun clatters on tile.

Above him, his brother swims into focus. 

In Ratface's ill-fitting clothes, his dirty sneakers. He lifts his foot and steps down on Sam's chest, his heel grinding through Sam's clothes into his cuts, rank stench as Sam tries to choke in air. He wrenches his head to the side. Six feet away his gun shines on the bathroom floor, inert.

“I thought you understood. Sam, sweetheart.” The word in Dean's mouth is obscene. Sam can't catch his breath, stunned, squirming weakly for the leverage he needs and his collarbone strains as the shifter leans his weight, bending down. “I prayed for you to come to me.”

Sam pushes at his ankle, tries to relieve the pressure. “Yeah, you're just here to help,” he gasps, voiceless, pushing as much scorn into it as he can.

“We are agents of salvation,” he says, mild, but his eyes are sparking, Dean's eyes, bitterness seeping in, a snarl playing on his lips. Sam stares up at him, sick, and thinks that there's no resemblance at all. “But _you_. You two slaughtered our sister like a pig and left her to rot.”

A bang outside, a body hitting the shed and he looks over his shoulder, weight shifting. Sam bites back pain and jabs a punch at his nuts and he catches Sam's wrist, lightening quick.

“No,” he says. “There are monsters in Trent, but they're not us.” Cruel now, twisting Dean's face and his voice is soft as he bends down to whisper in Sam's ear. “He's so _worried_ about you. Your freaky little blowjob fantasies and your--” 

“Shut up.” Sam's heart staggers, and he starts to thrash. “Shut up.”

“I'll make you a deal.”

“ _No_ ,” Sam says, less an answer than complete denial, heels digging in to the carpet and he can't move, he can't breathe right, can't pull his hand free, panic taking over. “Fuck you.”

“Aw. Sorry, kid. He's a slut, but he'd never touch you.” He digs his thumb into Sam's palm, a parody of a caress, of sympathy, and Sam realises with a bolt of horror where this is going. “ _Never_. Help me and I'll--”

“Go fuck yourself,” Sam spits, and his face deforms, savage. He drops a hand to Sam's belly, pulls his shirt up and digs his nails in, catching on stitches, healing skin. Fear nearly kicks Sam off the planet.

He smashes his cast sideways, into his knee, and hears something give. His other knee hits the ground and Sam puts two hands on his chest and _shoves_ , slams him back into the wall, flailing. A lamp crashes. He bounces off the bed and hits the floor at Sam's feet.

Sam scrambles backwards, raises his leg to kick but it's Dean's face, he can't kick Dean in the goddamn face, and at his hesitation the shifter grins, smug and vicious. Opens his mouth again, and his head snaps to the side and Sam throws his arms up instinctively to protect from the bang, the blood spray.

When he peers out Dean is standing in the doorway, gun still raised. His knuckles are raw; there's a bruise coming up at the corner of his mouth.

“What did it say?” he grates, after an age. 

Every muscle in Sam disintegrates and he collapses down onto his back. Stares up at the ceiling. Even his eyes ache. He shuts them. 

“Nothing,” he says, barely drawing enough breath to make it audible.

“What did it _say_.”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Sam insists, and the door creaks.

“Goddamn,” Joy's voice comes after a moment, taut with pain. “Shrink would have a field day with you two.”

“Think you just killed her,” Dean says.

“So I did,” she says, thread of satisfaction, and they keep on talking but Sam's stopped listening. He probes at his collarbone, testing the extent of the pain. Rolls his head to the side and across the carpet looking back at Sam is his brother, lips parted, blood-specks and freckles, his eyes a clear vacant green, staring at Sam like Sam is his future.

::

Dean is holding him up again, his arm stretched across Dean's shoulders. His legs are have stopped working. Again.

The three of them stand outside and contemplate the body by the car. Sam recognises her from her ID, her blonde hair matted now with mud, blood. It looks like it was a hard fight.

Dean props Sam against the wall and locks the door shut on the carnage inside. It feels like it should be midnight. It's barely hit ten in the morning.

“So that's two we owe you,” Dean says. Joy, holding her shoulder where Dean put it back in the joint, nods.

“Mhmm.” She winces. “Don't hold your breath waiting for the call.”

Agents of salvation, Sam thinks. What a joke. The talking cure; lofty claims to altruism. It's always threats and desperation in the end. Survival's never pretty but it always brings out the truth.

_He's a slut, but he'll never touch you._

“Maybe if you'd told us you worked this job before,” Sam says, and she flicks him an annoyed look.

“Ensenada didn't look anything like this. And I thought we cleared it out.”

“Guess you were wrong.” 

“Can it, Sam,” Dean says, dry as the grave.

“Guess so,” she snaps, drawing herself up to her full five-and-three height. “You got a lot to learn about playing with others, kid.”

“I'm not a kid.” Sam glares at her, cheeks flushing hot and tight, and feels himself start to lose it, voice threatening to break. “And if you'd done your job right the first time this never would have--”

“ _Sam_ ,” Dean barks, like he's their fucking dad, like he gets to tell Sam anything, and Sam takes off without looking at him, limping down the building towards their room, his chest sore, wild with a welling press of grief.

“You know what,” Joy says behind him. “Feel free to lose my number.”

Never had it to lose, Sam thinks, as meanly as he can, and doesn't look back, so he doesn't have to watch Dean try to hide his hurt.

::

Dean has the keys.

Sam sighs, leans defeated against the vending machine and waits for him to catch up. He throws Sam the key ring; feeds change into the machine and grabs a soda when it clatters dangerously to the bottom, presses it to the bruise coming up on his bottom lip.

“Always hated Dr Pepper,” he says, deadpan, out of nowhere, and then nothing else, until Sam overcomes the tremble in his hand, gets the key in the lock, and opens the door.

::

Their room is ransacked.

“That's just petty,” Dean says, muffled around the can, as they stand in the door and survey the damage. “Not like they didn't know where I keep everything.”

He jabs the TV on before Sam gets more than two steps in, bumping up the volume, colour and noise as they sift through the mess for gear worth keeping.

He is a giant solid ache and breathing hurts, bending over, straightening. He's not looking forward to the compressed hours in the car.

“I had a hundred and eighty bucks in here.” Dean clutches a sock in his fist. “Mother _fuckers_.” He stomps out the back door and returns ten minutes later with a stained fold of cash. Sam is taking up room on the end of the bed, dazed again, waiting for the drugs to kick in. His wrist aches, deep and throbbing.

“You ever watched this? It's not bad,” Dean says, and Sam claws his attention back into the room and sees Dr Sexy swan out of the operating theatre, his coat swooping behind him. Nurses faint in his wake. 

He has to go.

The need wakes in him like it never went away; the burn in his skin, his old companion. He can't live like this. He can't live with Dean knowing all the worst things about him. He can't be the worst thing in Dean's life, and he is, it's plain now, he can't pretend any longer.

He stands and grabs the last of his crap, shoves it into his bag, heads for the door. Dean is in the bathroom destroying a facecloth, scrubbing away the dried and drying. Digging under his fingernails. Butterfly strips on his forehead. The shifters had thrown the tumbler at the mirror and he's crunching shards underfoot and bent awkwardly to see himself, dodging the cracks. He pokes at the bruise under his mouth.

“Too tired for this shit,” he says, under his breath. Sam wavers on the threshold, unsure if he was supposed to hear, to respond. On the highway, a truck thunders past, an impassive streak of red against swollen grey cloud. It's going to rain. Again.

Dean pushes past him, swinging his keys around his finger. Where he's clean and unhurt, his skin is so pale it might be translucent, exhaustion in dark bags under his eyes.

“I can drive,” Sam offers.

“Over my dead body,” Dean says, so maybe Sam never understood what Dean was saying in first place.

::

They drive for eight hours. Northwest, through patchwork farmland, under a steady drizzle. Sam dozes fitfully, shuffled down against the window, arms crossed, fading in and out with the thumping wipers and Ozzy wails.

“All the miles we've eaten, and you know I've never been to the Grand Canyon?” Dean says, voice like gravel as they cross Route 93, LAS VEGAS shining up in white and green to their left. Sam hums and hopes it serves as a response. “Dad always said we'd--”

He snaps his jaw closed so hard his teeth click. Reaches and turns up the music. Sam stares out at the wet unchanging view. 

Half an hour later he takes the wheel and lets Dean pass out for a few hours, slumped against the door, drooling onto one of Sam's hoodies.

And what did Dad always say. What would he have said.

Listen to your brother. Do what he says. 

Do your job. Your ignorance is dangerous. The demons know you by name.

Keep your mouth shut.

He'll head east. Distance is key. Ash. He's got to get to Ash without the Harvelles interfering.

What about Bobby, it occurs to Sam to wonder, as he forces down a hot dog in some no-name hole in the ground in Baker County, staring at someone's disintegrating trailer. What about the paranoid bastard himself. He'd know something, surely.

There's snow on the peaks, creeping down to the road level, but out here between the mountains the sky is finally clear. Dean leans against the car, fiddling with his cigarette pack, turning it over and over in his fingers. He hasn't had one yet. Maybe it's empty. His head is tilted back, his eyes closed. The weak sun makes him glow, his bruises and grazes vivid and sore. He looks very young again, buried in their Dad's jacket. 

“You should get some more rest,” Sam says, and Dean checks his watch and blows a scornful breath through his nose. Crushes the pack in his hand and tosses it in the direction of the bin. The car door complains, opening.

He's given up trying to make conversation; hasn't said more than ten words since they hopped the river. He's barely looked at Sam once.

 _He's so_ worried _about you_ , the shifter mocks, in Dean's voice, and his Dad's, Bobby's, Duncan's, Ratface's, Mrs Greer's, his own a hundred times over, a kind little chorus that sings behind his eyes, inside his ribs, what's wrong with you, what's wrong with you? How could you think you would ever be normal?

::

On the edge of the sprawling Tri-Cities, on the third floor of the Hotel Royale, under flickering bathroom sodium with heavy rain slamming the windows, he throws back his pills and examines the footprint on his chest. Wedges himself into the tub and showers, bagged right hand propped out of the water. Runs his fingers across his stitches, tugs. Still intact, thank god. Dean looked after him well. Few more days and they'll be out.

There's blood clumping his hair; sweat, dirt, dust. He washes it all away.

He trades places with Dean, brushing against him in the doorway, eyes on the floor, and being in another state makes no difference to the ache Sam feels for him, how much he misses Dean's careless meaningless touch. It never has.

It won't be forever. Just until he's figured it out. What he is. What's coming for him. How to live with Dean and not destroy him.

In the morning. While Dean's asleep.

It's for the best.

::

Sam's in bed by the time Dean surfaces, steam clinging to his edges. He's sitting up with his laptop open, and as the bathroom goes dark he feels starkly spotlit by his browsing and the weak lamp beside him.

They're both in t-shirts and sweats; pretending, Sam hopes, that everything is as usual, and sure enough Dean settles as usual, throwing his dirty clothes in his duffel, slipping his Colt under his pillow. He fixes a drink from some emergency reserve of whiskey Sam's never seen before and lifts the curtain on the blurry lights of the river, stares out a while.

Sam lowers his gaze, scrolls blindly. It's so quiet, just the suffocating steady rainpatter. The clock doesn't have a radio but Sam needs one, needs something else pulled into this box of a room. 

“Had my first threesome out that way,” Dean says, without inflection, and he's not looking at Sam so it doesn't matter that Sam has to close his eyes a second, open to refocus on the screen in front of him, nonsense digital scratch, and beyond that the bedclothes, midnight blue fading into the shadows.

“Under the bridge?” he tries, and Dean flicks him something ironic in response, fragment of connection before it falls off his face, looking down at his glass, the tight regretful lines of his skin over his bones, mouth marred by his bruise.

“Portland.”

Sam doesn't want to know. It's not news that Dean's fucked around with multiple women before. What is this, punishment? Penance? Handing over these bits of himself like it compensates for what he's holding back, what he can't give up? Doesn't he know by now it's not enough? Sam stays mute and hopes it passes quickly.

“They found me at a bar. Just a normal one. They had this penthouse, this, huge waterbed, like a pool. Took turns. Blowing me. And I was, I was pretty high so it took a while.”

Sam shuts his laptop with a hand he thinks might be shaking. It's closing on midnight. He has to go to sleep. He has to get out of here.

“She went second and he--”

“Stop it,” Sam whispers, reeling.

“--fucked her while she was--”

“Stop it.” Loud this time, sharp. His hands curl into fists on the lid, cast digging into his right palm, vision down to a pinpoint on the blanket, the shape of his knees underneath.

Dean drops the curtain and turns, leans on the windowsill. His voice is strained.

“Jesus, Sam, how can I--”

“Please,” Sam says. He can barely get the words out. “I know.”

“No.” Dean wipes his brow on his wrist, ice in his drink clinking. “You don't. I—a couple of years back I went past. Past—your place—I went to this off-campus bar, wait, listen to me—and I. I picked up this kid. Kinda shaggy and um.” He's breathing fast and he looks away into the corner of the room. “What do you think that means?”

“Nothing,” Sam snaps, reflexively, appalled, and Dean flinches. “Nothing, Dean, come on you don't—come on, seriously, what would Dad think?”

Dean nods to himself, slow. His shoulders settle into a firm straight line; his face into hardness. “Yeah, you know what?” He pushes himself upright, and shocks Sam deeply. “Fuck what he'd think.”

Three steps and he's next to the bed, tall above, eyes dark. Dangerous. Sets his glass on the table, pulls Sam's laptop from under his hands and tosses it on the other bed and it happens too fast for Sam to stop him, his heart racing, weak to his core. 

“What would you have said,” Dean says, “if I'd knocked on your door?”

Sam swallows, neck craned back and the knot in his throat goes nowhere. “I would have said, ah, hi Dean, come in.”

Dean reaches out, fingertips skating across Sam's hairline, into his hair, a livewire current. Sam holds his breath and tries not to lean into it. “Would you have let me touch you?”

 _No_. No, I'm stronger than that. I know what's best for you.

“Yeah,” he says, but it hurts, and Dean smoothes his cheek, soothes. Thumbs across his lips. 

“Would you have used your mouth?”

“Yeah,” Sam whispers.

Dean stifles a noise, deep in his throat. Eyes on where his thumb is moulding Sam and his voice is a wreck. “You got it bad, Sammy.”

Black roiling shame and this thing alive between them, Sam has no idea what to do.

“Me too, I guess,” Dean murmurs, bends down and kisses him, closemouthed, his hand slipping around the back of Sam's head as Sam tilts and opens up and reaches for him, mirrors his grip and they're kissing for real, for _real_ , soft dizzying press and the burn of his mouth and he tastes like whiskey and Sam _has_ him. Long shifting seconds and it's good, it's deliberate and almost chaste and so good even at this terrible angle with his back aching and his throat stretched and his lungs tight and airless.

Sam grabs at his shoulder, tries to pull him onto the bed but he resists, tries to rise but Dean keeps him down, but this isn't enough, he can't take it if this it, this can't be _it_ —he nips at Dean, shoves the blanket back and swings around, gets his feet on the floor.

“What,” he says, pulling away a fraction, and Dean chases his mouth, mindless, smothers the rest until Sam breaks off, presses words into the point of his cheek. “The shifter, what did it tell you?”

“It said, ah.” Dean straightens as Sam runs his good hand up the back of his thigh, stops under the curve of his ass. “Said you wanted to—you had this—it just _said_ it, why do people--” 

Sam pulls him in, close, a final stumbling step and Dean's hand curves strong at the base of his skull like Sam might ever dream of trying to get away. He licks his lips, swollen and sensitive. 

Dean's eyes flutter closed and he pales.

“Wait,” he says, but when his eyes open they're blown black and he's filling up right in front of Sam, showing through his sweats. Sam nuzzles into the soft cotton of his t-shirt, pulls the scent of him deep inside, stitches stretching as his chest expands, feeding the heat curling his veins. “You don't know what it--”

“I can guess,” Sam says. He hooks his fingers in Deans waistband; pulls carefully down and bites off a goan: Dean's naked under there, bobbing free, big and dark, the weight of his balls and his smell and he makes a hungry, helpless noise that blows the top right off Sam's head. His knees tremble against Sam's thighs. Sam's mouth waters.

“I don't--” Dean's hand locks in his hair, presses him against his chest, the muscles behind his skin, all his power, like he can keep Sam here and Sam will forget about his dick, the proof, how much he wants Sam, how much he needs him: Dean that liar, who touched him first, kissed him first, making promises he can't keep once he's in it. “It was—bad, it was--”

“I want to,” Sam says, hurried in the face of Dean's doubt, and blushes, stupidly, roiling inside, he can't make himself shut up. "For you, I want you to feel--”

“Oh, kid,” Dean moans, a grimace, “oh, fuck,” dismayed, and Sam reads him quick, the impulse to run.

He rises and twists, topples Dean back onto the bed, throws a leg over his thighs as he tries to get purchase. Leans down and swallows his whispers, _you don't know, you don't know_ , pained, and he's been trying, Sam realises, he's been trying to tell Sam something all along.

“This guy,” Sam says, and ruts his hips down. He's so hard he's pushing through the top of his boxers, the constriction rubbing, and Dean bedrock solid under him,. “He looked like me.”

Dean surges up, hooks an ankle over Sam's thigh to bring them closer. “Yeah,” he says. His hand is still clenched in Sam's hair and he pulls Sam down for a kiss, clutching at Sam's face, so bruising Sam loses thought for a moment, fighting down a building madness: how many others? Did they get in you? Did they get in you like you got in me? Have you let them? Have you _let_ them? When you never let me? 

“You picked him up. You wanted him,” he says, and Dean stills a moment, eyes huge and serious.

“Not him.”

Sam slows; smiles, despite himself, to a find blooming warmth in his chest. Dips to lick across Dean's lips and grinds down, luxurious.

“How long?” He murmurs. Dean blinks at him in incomprehension. “Tell me,” he says, drops his hand between them, to Dean's dick, touches him finally, his hardness, pulls up, makes him buck and Dean gapes at him, a crease between his eyebrows.

“That's not fair,” he says, confused, and then, stronger, on the edge of anger, “that's not _fair_ ,” trying to disentangle, pushing at Sam's shoulders.

“Tell me.” Sam noses at his cheek, jacks him again. Dean squirms under him and Sam thumbs under the crown, watches the feeling overtake him, the twist in his face, so close to pain. His lips are so red. “You owe me.” 

He gets rolled for that one, Dean on top, shoving Sam's boxers down. Sam gasps with relief and Dean already has them sliding together and that hurts, pressure on his chest, hurts deep and aching and sharp in the lines of his cuts where his skin shifts wrong and that's nothing, that just makes it better: Dean's hand is on him, calloused and sure, tugging a rhythm that sparks in Sam's brain, along his spine, his balls, down to his feet.

“Tell me how long.”

“It's not like that,” Dean whispers into his neck. Sam groans, kicks his boxers off, pulls at Dean's shirt, clumsy with his cast, pulls until Dean reaches behind and finishes the job, and then whips Sam's off too, tosses them away and their bodies line up skin to skin and he feels Dean shudder, feels precome dab along the line of his hip where Dean's dick skids.

 _So long you don't even know_ , Sam thinks, awed, slides his fingers along the lines of Dean's chest, the sweat shining there lit up by the lamp. Flicks a nipple and Dean grunts and he slides his hand higher and grabs the amulet, horns digging into his palm and the necklace pulling. Meets Dean's gaze and the dread in it stuns him a moment. 

Unease spikes his heart; looming disaster. 

“There's something else.”

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“It's nothing.”

“What _else_ , Dean?” His voice rises in alarm.

“Fuck, hell, nothing else,” Dean says, but they're naked, together and he has Dean's pulse under his thumb and he knows, dark and sinking, he already knows, he just hasn't been listening.

“Dad,” he says, sick, and Dean screws his eyes closed and makes a wretched wordless sound, grabs Sam's jaw, vicelike, bends down and forces a hard smearing kiss, teeth pressing behind his lips.

“Save you,” he says, a slurred rush, “he said I'd have to, he said I'd have to save you, and if I couldn't--”

Sam leaves his body. 

“Yeah,” he sighs, shaking, white-out. It almost feels like bliss. They slow; he sags back into the bed and Dean keeps pressing kisses, grabbing at his face, talking, he keeps talking. It reaches Sam distantly, through the numbness.

“--never, hey, hey, you know that, you _know_ that Sam, Sammy, I'd die first, I'd cut my own--”

“When?”

“In the hospital, just before--”

“Why?”

“He didn't say.”

“Don't lie to me.” He can hear himself tremble, come back down. It's bad, it's gonna be bad.

“It's all he said, I swear, why do you think I've been so-- “

“That's not _enough_.”

“Don't you think I fucking _know_ that?” Dean explodes, rearing back but not going away and Sam pushes at him in revolt, too weak to shift his weight. 

“Save me,” he says, nauseous, trying to curl onto his side, into a ball. “But if I'm too, if I'm too--”

“I don't wanna do this anymore, I can't. I _can't_ ,” Dean says, pulling at him, his arms, turning him back around, “I just wanna—come here--”

His dying wish, Sam thinks, his father's dying wish, murder, slipping into Dean's ear, how is he supposed to cope with this?

“He knew all along,” he moans, and realises that Dean, too, Dean knew all along, all these weeks, looked at him every day and didn't find it noteworthy to mention, to say Sam, _sweetheart_ , don't step wrong. Watch your killing hand, and sleep with your light on. Your father wants you dead.

“No,” Dean is saying, “no, no, there's nothing to know.”

“What's _wrong_ with me?”

“Nothing, I promise, hey, listen to me, listen to me.”

“What _am_ I?”

“You're my brother,” Dean says, like that's an answer, leans down and kisses him again, frantic, runs his hands up Sam's sides, casting shivers across Sam's skin, tightening his nipples. “Yeah, come on, come on, it's okay. It's gonna be okay.”

“Liar,” Sam says, but his knees fall apart and Dean makes a grateful sound, grinds down and whatever blood they'd lost returns, returns so fast Sam's head spins with the weight of Dean on him again and his heat, the insistent press of his dick, his roving hands, on Sam's belly, his balls, behind; Sam gasps, and it happens: Dean opens him up. Gets all through Sam, makes him sweat, and fight, and keeps him wanting, fucking himself down onto Dean's thick fingers as Dean works him from the inside. 

The wind picks up its howl and the room creaks and the bed moans and it's not enough and it's better than he'd dreamed, and when Dean leans back and turns him, pulls him up to his knees he's glad, for the relief on his wounds and so that Dean can't see his face; he relaxes into it for a minute and that's a mistake, as Dean holds him apart and presses in, deep and slick with lube, and huge, stretching. He's unprepared for how good it feels to be ruined like this and his jaw drops and he makes a guttural hungry sound, braces himself and leans into it as Dean starts up a rhythm and it's pointless, trying to resist, to hide, because his body is telling the truth and when someone has the truth about you they've got you, they've got you whether you like it or not and then they can do what they want. 

“Have you like this always, all the time,” Dean whispers into the back of his neck, curled over him, deep inside, “for me, just for me, waiting for me,” hot against Sam's skin, like he comes into the room and Sam has been waiting for him, in the bed, the rustled sheets, naked, sweaty and starved, because it's been years, it's been so long and maybe he's already, he's already prepared himself so Dean can just, make _use_ \--

“Yeah,” he gasps, wrecked, and Dean picks up his pace; reaches around and takes him in hand and ends him. He shudders through it, pulses across Dean's knuckles, around Dean's dick. His forehead hits Sam's back, blast of hot breath that catches and he says _Jesus Sam_ , raw, _you're killing me_ and comes, groaning, his hands hooked under Sam's shoulders pulling Sam back onto him, forcing deeper, and maybe that's the truth of Dean as well. Maybe it goes both ways.

It hurts when he pulls out, just a flare, oversensitive, and then it's his heart throbbing pleasantly in the stretch, in every wound, every bruise. His shoulders are shaking and Dean pats across them. Massages in an absent way, breathing hard, wiping with sheets, and then he reaches, clicks off the lamp and loops an arm around Sam's waist and pulls him over and down, brings Sam's face close, thumbs the wet out of his lashes and kisses him, once, soft and cradling.

They lay there in the dark.

Nothing left to say, Sam supposes, rubs his cheek on Dean's shoulder. Nothing left to do. Nowhere to go.

He's too tired to care, too empty. 

Dean sniffs, adjusts his hold; wraps his arms around tighter, closer, and Sam weaves their legs together and pulls the covers up to keep their heat in, their saturated sex smell, cloying but _them_ at least, purely them. Cocooned, rain thrumming the windows and rumbling distant thunder; they wait for sleep, or dawn or peace, and Dean shifts, buries his face in Sam's hair, his fingers grazing against the pulse in Sam's neck and Sam holds him back and listens, the hush of their breath in the air, the creak of this old hotel in the walls and the coming storm outside, and under his ear the steady constant beat of his brother's living body.

::

The end. 

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/169732920036/lovetown-20531-words-by-nigeltde-chapters-33) for those so inclined.


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